4       It is curious that I have somehow neglected your birthday on the 12th of March. You have drawn my attention to it more than once but I have acted as if I were unconcerned altogether. I know that birthdays have an importance. According to the Mother, one is more plastic than at other times to the Divine and there is a new chance each year on that occasion to bring one's soul to the front. But there are people who are constantly being re-bom day after day, and for such people the official birthday is not of special significance. To me you are a person who is made "new" more and more in the image of the "true" every twenty-four hours. Your whole life is attuned to the

10       Your long letter was a great relief. You have been on my mind ever since we last got a ghostlike sense of your presence somewhere. Your total disappearance puzzled and worried all your friends. In the meantime we heard nasty news about the activities of your ill-wishers. You must have come to know of them too. But you are a soul as tough on one side as it is tender on the other - a sort of Belisarius though not battered by Fate so horribly. Belisarius was the greatest general during the reign of Justinian in Rome. Both he and his emperor married dancing girls. The empress conspired his ruin and had him degraded. His wife ran away with a monk. In the end the once-fa

16       Your long-distance call was a unique event in the history of Mother India. Never before has any voice from beyond Pondicherry come precisely in reponse to my work in our Monthly Review of Culture with such an irrepressible joy. In more than the sense of sheer surprise the call seemed to arrive "out of the blue". It was as if Sri Aurobindo, from another world which is yet mindful of earth's aspiration and effort, had found on earth a receptive soul to transmit his still continuing appreciation of what a child of his had been trying to do ever since February 1949 for a periodical about which he had once said when a carping critic had doubted the authenticity of the v

23       I thank you for your sustained periodic generosity to our work. You have posed me the question:   "What is the interrelation between the Mother and Her Grace? I have searched for a clear answer in the books of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, as well as in your books and Mother India. On the one side the Divine Grace seems quite independent and separate; on the other side it appears to me to be the most important instrument of the Mother and a part of Her."   You quote a number of passages from the Mother and then conclude:   'It appears to me that, on the one hand, I have to surrender exclusively to the Mother, and on the other hand to give

8       It is 4.58 in the morning. I have got Up nearly an hour earlier than usual. Before my eyes opened, there were these words in my mind: "He is everywhere" — and when I opened my eyes I spontaneously whispered: "Everywhere is He." Somehow the very next thought was to write to you. And I realised that a connection had been made between you and me through an invisible Omnipresence. I know that to say such a thing is rather high-flown and the spirit of our age is all for a subdued key where matters beyond the senses are concerned. But we must not fear to be poets and mystics. They do not belong just to one age or another. They belong to the subtle eternity that runs throu

25       Whether I reply soon or after some delay you are always present to me and happy thoughts fly towards you. Especially at the Samadhi there is a close communication, for there more than anywhere else I have a sense of us meeting within that eternal source of love and unity - the Mother's creative and transformative and all-harmonising heart. Always to live with a sense of being born from that fountain of felicity is the very meaning of life for us.   You have asked me how to meditate or concentrate. I know of no particular method and these terms never occupy my mind. I am aware only - as I have been saying from a long time back- of a warmth and a glow in my hear

24       Thank you for so prompt a letter of genuine sympathy after hearing from S about my fracture. But why do you say I have had repeatedly to cope with such accidents? In my life of 87 years and of at least 870 tosses, this is the first time I have broken a bone - though I seem to have counterbalanced my long immunity by breaking the biggest bone in the body, the thigh-bone! You may be interested to realise that the leg is the same - the right one - and the bone too identical - the femur - as Sri Aurobindo's in 1938. So in one sense I may be considered to have walked very faithfully in my Guru's footsteps. Unfortunately I have done it with a great initial disadvantage

26       You have sent me quite a tale "of woes crying out for panaceas:   "1) How to get rid of the wrench we feel when relations and friends, after spending some time, leave us? 2)How to get rid of useless thoughts and the nervousness that accompanies something we don't remember and we chide ourselves for forgetting it? 3)How to get rid of the remorse we feel when we forget to ask important questions to a friend Like Amal Kiran? 4)How to get back the equipoise we lose when someone near and dear dies and we feel we didn't do enough for him or her? 5)How to prevent ourselves from being shaken in the event of a friend committing suicide? 6)How to

20       I have been hearing from certain quarters time and again that our Yogic work at present is to divinise our physical cells. No doubt, the divinisation of the body, so that it becomes immune to disease, decrepitude and even death, is the crown of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga of the Supramental Descent and Transformation. To keep this climax in view and to create an eagerness and readiness in the body for it, so that the physical cells may open to the transformative Supermind, is nothing in itself to be scorned as mere fantasy and megalomania. But can their divinisation ever be achieved without first enlightening our narrow prejudice-ridden mind, our ambitious resti

Chapter One THE PROBLEM: ITS INDIAN IMPLICATIONS - THE HISTORICAL QUESTIONS INVOLVED In India the problem of Aryan origins has not only a bearing on the remote past. It has also a relevance to the immediate present. Ever since Western historians pronounced, and the historians of our country concurred, that a Dravidian India had been invaded by the Aryans of the Rigveda in the second millennium B.C., there has been a ferment of antagonism, time and again, between the North and the South. The Northerners, figuring in their own eyes as Aryan conquerors, have occasionally felt a general superiority to the Southern