BABUL'S WORLD

From: Devabrata

2015-09-19T11:22:00.000+05:30

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Devabrata

Promod Kumar Chatterjee-a painter and a seeker

2009-06-06T20:12:00.004+05:30

Promod Kumar Chattopadhyay (1885-1979) was an interesting personality who travelled through many vicissitudes in his life. He was a traveler and travelled extensively all over India, Nepal and Tibet for pilgrimage. But it was not merely for the purpose of pilgrimage –though its spiritual significance was not absent in his psychology-but for his passionate seeking for meeting the enlightened yogis and sadhus, he spent a considerable period of his early and middle life in the paths of the Himalayas and other places of India like a barefooted sannyasin. But he was not a sannyasin. He was already married then and his wife was a loving and dutiful woman. He was a painter of high quality. However, nothing could bind him with the normal familial life and ordinary world. Actually, for an indomitable aspiration for realizing the spiritual truth he became a little restless. This moved him to the dusty path of eternal India. He met innumerable spiritual personalities of almost all the disciplines of the spiritual kingdom of India in the course of his frequent travelling. His love and respect for sacred India and his thirst for India’s spiritual treasure were the predominant factors that determined and shaped predominantly the course of his life. Eventually, he became a realized person, a siddha in Vrindavan –a sacred pilgrimage place of North India- famous for Lord Krishna and Radha’s lila there on the bank of river Yamuna from time immemorial. He then returned home and pursued his career as a painter to earn a livelihood. He joined Baroda School of Arts as its Principle in the Twenties of the last century. Later he founded National Art Gallery in Masilipattanam in Andhra Pradesh in South India and became its President. He wrote many books on his experiences in the course of his extensive travelling in Bengali. His thirst to know about Tantric philosophy and practice led him to visit many renowned places of Tantric sadhana and he met many enlightened yogis and sadhaks of Tantra-discipline. He will be remembered for his renowned book “Tantrabhilasir sadhusanga” which is rich with the history, philosophy and the past glory and present decadence of Tantric sadhana in India and other places. Later he joined Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry in 1958. He painted some portraits of Sri Aurobindo which were highly praised by the Mother as they reflected the inner being of Sri Aurobindo to a great extent. He was amongst a very few who saw a vision of Supramental consciousness in the form of a winged bird. He came to Calcutta again for some personal work in 1975. But he did not return to Pondicherry as his daughters wanted his presence amongst them for the remaining days of his life.* He left his body on 22 September 1979 at the age of 94.

Once when Promod Kumar was returning home after visiting the Kailash Mountain and the lake Manas sarovar in Tibet he, by mistake, walked through a wrong path near Chmpawati in Almora district and entered into a deep forest. He was to reach Tanakpur to catch the train the next day with an elderly person with whom he was travelling. He was detached from his companion who was much behind Promod Kumar in the path. Promod Kumar as was natural to him was walking faster than his companion and was deeply engrossed in the beauty of the surrounding nature. After an hour he came to realise that he was following the wrong path which led him in the deep forest in stead of his destination. He was to reach Tanakpur before the evening. Then it was already evening in the forest and there was no path found for coming out of it. Then to worsen the situation, rain began to fall from already thickly overcast sky. It became gradually severe and the darkness became absolute. He fell from a height on a boulder, which hurt him badly. He was horrified in that dangerous and frightful situation. Leeches clung to his both feet and legs up to the thighs and were sucking his blood. He was bleeding and became extremely weak.

He lost his sense, remained there in the severe cold, and got completely drenched. After sometime he woke up only to suffer consciously. In the middle of that night he cried out to the God, “Why have you put me in such a situation?” Then all of a sudden he heard someone telling clearly in grave voice “Do you regard God as the doer of all your work?” Instantaneously an inner lightening struck him and by a flashing light he realized that he always thought himself as the doer of all his works and enjoyed the results himself, good or bad, that ensued from his works and regarded God as a separate and vast collective consciousness who was not anyway related to his individual work arising out of his personal initiatives. He said to himself “Then why do I call the God to come to my rescue for coming out of this danger that befalls on me for my wrong work? Actually it is the mechanical response of my vital nature. In childhood we call our parents for help and later we call the God whenever we get troubled as consequence of our own works. It becomes as spontaneous as our breathing lungs!”

Perhaps he knew it before but never before was so much aware of this fact. **

The writing of this article is based on this realization of Promod Kumar Chattopadhyay. We all know from our reading of The Gita that we should not expect the fruits of our work. We do not have right for the fruits or results of our work. So we should work not for ourselves but for the Divine. In the same way we do not have any right to work by ourselves. We are mere instruments through whom the Divine is working for something only known to Him. The basic principle of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga is not to attain Brahman or God but to make oneself open to the Divine so that He can work through us. One does not know what is to be achieved from his life. What one is to become. So what makes the feeling that it is I who is working? It is the ego that so feels. But one may raise a point that one does many wrong and heinous works for narrow self satisfactions. Are all these works are done by God? Yes. There is none except Him in His creation. He is evolving i.e. he is in the process of attaining or achieving in myriad ways in all things and beings including the sadhus and murderous criminals. In this journey of evolution everything is progressing towards Him through Him. There is no wrong act. It is the ego only that defines. According to the status of ego in the evolution the work or karma is done in ignorance. We started to compare good and bad karma from the time we started to get in touch of consciousness higher than the general or ‘normal’ in enlightened beings and also in times even in ourselves. There is only one divine pressure behind the evolutionary urge. In some it is less hindered and so we meet a yogi or a poet or great visionaries and in some it is to move through obstacles and we are met with criminals or a Hitler. Every wrong act is an upheaval or catastrophe from the perverse point of ego.

But a bhakta may well ask where does he stand personally in this evolutionary process? He may obviously want to be justified of his individual dignity in his existence! Yes –the Divine approves and acknowledges his want.

But before that one must consecrate all his work and life to the Divine until one feels that it is the Divine that works through him and moves through him. When one consciously feels that the Divine is absolutely established as the driver in his being and one acts from the status of his union with the divine then only he will feel his individual justification in the vibration of the delight of unfolding of the supreme Divine will in this infinite creation. But one must be aware of one’s individual soul first as it is the individual link of the divine that exists within one.

The first essential work in this yoga is to give the right and the fruit of one’s work to the Divine. So the Mother tells us to work with a prayer “Grant that I may do as well as I can the best things to do.” She insists to be in our best in all our works so that she may face less hindrance in her work in us. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother always insisted on the perfection of our instrumentality.

*As told to me by Promod Kumar in presence of his daughter.

**Promod Kumar was able to come out from that jungle and caught the scheduled train on the next day at Tanakpur.

Emerging of a new world

2009-06-02T20:24:00.006+05:30

From time immemorial regions in and around the Himalayas were liked by the sadhus, yogis and seekers of spiritual life. For the people of India, the Himalayas generally stand as the platform from where one may reach God. Actually, the most casual travelers also feel a subtle divine presence in the Himalayan regions. One feels elevated and even for a moment, though transitory and short-lived one gets inclined for spiritual life. This is not due to the natural beauty only of the Himalayas but for the spiritual atmosphere of the place thanks to the sadhana of the seekers and yogis that took place for thousands of years in these places. This is not the belief and feeling of Indians only but for many foreign travelers who have also felt the spiritual air of the Himalayas. Therefore, the Himalayas enjoy a special status as spiritual field. However, the spiritual seekers always sought calm, serene natural places for their sadhana. It is very difficult to practice yoga living in crowded, noisy urban places. It is very natural for man to go for secluded life whenever he feels an urge for higher spiritual existence. The human nature with its mind and restless life movements are required to be calmed and peaceful before taking a step in the path. Whatever the spiritual school –all seekers feel the need of secluded life first to discipline the gross human nature-or to get rid of it. Therefore, spiritual life was generally associated with calm natural places in India. Those who did not find the Himalayas convenient to their situation went to different places that were at least a little far from busy places. The riverside, the forests, the hills were most suitable places for living a calm life for practicing yoga. There were exceptions-but very few. The purpose of this writing is not about the seekers of spiritual life notwithstanding. The nature is inner breathing in man though man is not always aware of it. But always seek to rush to the nature for getting refreshed and touched with feelings that are vast, infinite, peace, silence and calmness and for this, peaceful natural places are most convenient and helpful. There was no dearth of such peaceful places in India and other places earlier. With the growing population, massive industrialization and destruction of nature along with change of an all-out system of social life with the support of the scientific developments, the world has become small and very cohesive organisation. In the modern world, man cannot live a secluded life psychologically and geographically ignoring his social involvement. The whole world has changed, with this is changed also our view of the outer world. The sky is not infinite –it is a relative notion. There remains no unknown place for exploration. The Moon is not the same moon; it is going to be a camp for further travel in space. The Ganga is polluted, the Everest has been desecrated. The birds and wild animals are being extinct. The crickets are not found chirping to silence the night. Man has landed in a small, limited and noisy place known conventionally as the beautiful green earth. He, in absence of nature and calm life-is detached from all the great feelings that were solace to his mind and life. He is constantly pushed with his back to the wall. He is now made a nut in a giant and automatic machine-called life. But he is still that man who aspired to go beyond everything, all limitations. But in this way he has lost the world, the natural world also that sustained and supported him. The old world of nature and living will not return for him. They are lost forever. But the basic urge within will push him to get all the great feeling that once nature gave him. But where shall he find the infinity of the sky, the vastness of the oceans, the silence of the forests…? For this, he will fall back on himself to find all that moved and thrilled him earlier. He will discover the world and the universe in infinite ways in himself. The world created outside will find its root in him. Then and only the then the purpose of God in man will be fulfilled.

The fading remnant of a song

2009-05-28T16:59:00.003+05:30

Yesterday I suddenly woke up from sleep in the night just before the beginning of dawn. I was dreaming. Now I cannot recollect what the dream was all about. Actually, I am unable to say convincingly whether it was a dream at all. But, there had been something that I felt before I woke up. What was it? There was a feeling in me. It was that I had been hearing a very sweet melodious song. I tried to remember the wording of the song but I could not. I had heard it in the last line when it was fading as if moving far from me. The most peculiar thing was that I had a feeling that I knew the whole song and its beautiful tune. It had been so captivating that I felt it was a song sung for my life; actually, it was a call for me where I live in my unknown existence. Naturally, I sought to hear it again and perhaps I wanted to remember myself in that song after waking up. I felt that I had been living for this song and I could live till the last day of my life for the sake of this song. I had wanted to know and hear and understand many things in my life but when I heard the fading remnant of the tune I had known it for certain that all the response of my seeking was carried through this tune. As I woke up, I was deeply sad and thought that I missed it forever. At the same time I went on thinking that, it was something that one could never miss. It was like missing oneself! I knew it and but I could not remember. If I ever remembered it I would discover myself!

Author of my life

2009-05-19T11:44:00.004+05:30

In my last posting, I wrote about formation of individuality in life. I think this is the basic thing one must know about spirituality. Whatever I like to know or love to know is obviously related to my own inclination as to how I can be satisfied. Man is not driven by reason. He is carrying a spontaneous and continuous thirst to get himself harmonized in what he seeks to know. In his seeking, he unknowingly wants to get resonance of a truth that is already in him. Even reason is a godhead that we worship not for its own sake but for the sake of overall existential harmony.

However, my point is not to get to the root of reason as the prime mover of our search for truth. We are not always happy to know a truth that we arrive through reasoning. It is because we want a truth that can make us satisfied happily. If a truth arrived through reasoning fails to satisfy an individual or a collective body then it is in confliction of our sense of harmony-which again is the basis of truth. The fallacy lies in our inability to conceive a reality in its wholeness. It is not my interest here to discuss this aspect of reasoning in man.

I am concerned only with our satisfaction in relation to truth. We want to know only to be satisfied. What is this satisfaction? This is an existential phenomenon. I seek only to be complemented with a truth that sustains me. I may say that I have been searching myself in all my seeking. It is I –but it is hidden I. So there is a constant pressure in life to seek it in everything-and everything for the satisfaction of being discovered.

He is the author and this life of mine is his satisfaction-his tale.

Individuality

2009-05-15T11:50:00.001+05:30

Every life has its own truth and this is the guiding star of that life. There are innumerable shores to reach at while floating on a vast ocean. However, a ship has a fixed and single destination to reach. Life is like a vast ocean, we are like ships, and for each of us there is a fixed destination. The only difference is that a shore may be a destination for different ships whereas for each individual the destination is unique. There cannot be a single destination for two or many persons because it is only in man that the sense or theme of individuality is formed and developed through the passage of life.

One has rightly told that the whole aim of evolution is to create perfect individuals. The basis of individuality is a truth that is concerned with that individual only. However, this is not to say that that there is no single truth governing this creation and the world is a conglomeration of different truths –which may even be contradictory to one another. But this is not like that.

The conception of truth is there in the world of manifestation, creations. Each single individual sense of fulfillment is a part of the harmony that sustains all separate expressions. Therefore, the validity of truth lies in relations. The Brahman has no truth as such, –He is because He is.

However, my point is about individual truth as I belong to manifested creation. The aim of life, therefore, is to find that truth in me or for that matter find the truth of my life. The sadhana begins with this effort of discovering the truth around which the life has been organized. To this end, we must get some hints of that organizing truth. Where and how do I exist individually?

Then begins a hide and seek affair. It is there in everything and at the same time, it is nowhere! It is impossible to grab it by effort as any psychological movement makes the water surface too turbid to see what lies beneath. Any mental query, any vital want veil its existence. As it is in the state of budding it is yet to get hold of all the life movements. So one must try to be as transparent as possible. What is this transparency? This is unperturbed life movement and an effortless stillness within.

The tuning of one's life lies there. Once the tune is heard and felt the meaning of the existence in the life begins to be gradually revealed.

The path can be seen –lit by that inner light. It is its own path.

The world and I

2009-04-03T11:05:00.003+05:30

As usual I went to my roof in the early morning. It was still not morning as it was 4.30 am. It is a pleasant experience to be under the vast sky and finding trees and various plants around me at that time. People, still in their deep sleep leave me to feel alone in that calm world. The most beautiful thing is to feel that the dawn wakes up gradually as if to create a world still half hidden in the dark of night. Like the child Krishna who had in his ankles the bells which jingled sweetly as he walked –the dawn steps in with the calls of birds. The air suddenly becomes fragrant with the fragrance of the trailing robe of the dawn.

Yesterday the air was slightly wet as there were clouds in the east. The touch of the air was felt very soothing on the cheeks. The early morning was very soft-like that of a loving heart. I was watering the tiny plants that were in the flower-pots. It is my regular work. I looked around me and saw the tops of trees and of a few tall buildings. As I was looking to all of them I suddenly dropped in the depth of my seeing eyes. I felt that I knew them as I knew my eyes. Is seeing a function to know others? Seeing seemed to be creating! They came up from the centre of my existence and as I felt my body as my own –they also were I. They were even more intimately known to me than I knew my arms or feet. Even breathing was more artificial than seeing. Was I actually seeing or in a different mode of experience? I felt an intense urge to melt down in all I see around me. But still the mind was active only as interference to a beautiful discovering process. So I tried to know the relation between the world and me. How this world is poised in me-was a seeking –the remnant of mental obstinacy was there. All of a sudden the world threw me out in its peripheries as one of the many separately existing beings in its kingdom. But just before my fall it dawned in me that the relation of this world with me was laid in the consciousness of a unity. The trees, the birds, the flowers....all were ramifications of a single oneness. Perhaps it exists in an unspecified centre in me.

21 February 1878, The Mother's birthday (Darshan Day)

2009-02-22T10:49:00.001+05:30

Message Distributed in Ashram, 21st Feb 2009

Live always as if you were under

the very eye of the supreme and of

the Divine Mother. Do nothing, try to

think and feel nothing that would

be unworthy of the Divine Presence.

- Sri Aurobindo

21st February 1878, The Mother's Birthday

In Sri Aurobindo Ashram it is observed as Darshan Day

On this special day devotees are allowed to visit the room of Mother and Sri Aurobindo

Thoughts

2008-12-20T17:07:00.003+05:30

Is it possible for a man to break his sleep by himself? There must be a will to break. But how can a will be formed when one is not aware that he is in sleep? Then why one wakes up without any external interference? Perhaps the body needs to be woken up, to come out from sleep for its own reason and its own time-the kaal. It is an inner condition that makes the necessity to be in an awakened state.

So is this life coming out in a more conscious state.

The darkness is fading out but there is still no light. It just gets the hint of the of the coming of the first ray of the dawn but not the dawn itself. Does a flower is aware of the act of its gradual unfolding before becoming a full bloomed flower?

I have never seen the sun-but my eye-lids have caught a vibration to open and see.

But who determines time-kaal?

He and I

2008-12-13T10:36:00.001+05:30

Where shall I go? He does not move in me. He only enjoys me in whatever I do and want. But he does not do anything and has no want for himself. He is not involved in my circumstances and concerns. His only involvement is me –myself. His link to this world and life is through my pulse. He has a light –but the path is left to me for my treading. The light is not mere light but a leading light- perhaps for a destination rooted with his source.. He does not love when I love. But he is love itself. He has no preference for anyone. But when I love he is also there- not for my sake –even not for my love’s sake but for his involvement in my being. He is the essence of love. So whenever there is love he is traced there like the fragrance of a flower is traced to the flower itself. If you keep the flower in a far place –the fragrance is feeble and only in trace. So he is there in traces in my human love. Does a flower love anyone? No –it gives out its fragrance to all without preference. So is he in me who loves without preference. But in every preferred love of mine he is being more aware of his own being who is carrying with him a source of love. Unlike a flower –he grows in my awareness and more I grow the more he fills me with his own love-boundless and all pervading. So where shall I go and for what or for whom? It is not me that go with me. There is none who is needed and there is no place I need to live or stay. He has been feeling through my every foot-step, my breathing and finding eyes, ears, hearts and senses for me to tune them with his own. Whenever I move for anything –he moves for me there. Whenever I love someone he loves for me. As we grow in nature and by nature-he is growing through me and by me-only to become fully himself in his full light and love.

unfulfilled dreams

2008-12-08T20:12:00.001+05:30

One -in young days dreams and wants for many things and spreads to various directions. Not all wishes and dreams are fulfilled. If there was anything at all that can satisfy a person! In the end it is felt that one was actually born in a wrong world that satisfies none! Or because the very person was wrong in a right world? So when it is time for the sun of life leaving this world -the tired birds of our wishes return -unfulfilled and gather round the tree from where they once flied to cross the horizons.

The Eternal Traveller

2008-12-07T15:35:00.002+05:30

He is a traveller in me. I am not aware of him although he travels with me all the time. As the shadow and its object is inseparable- so is this traveller who is with me and never leaves me. He travels through me in my life. He is there in all my feelings –my pain, my sufferings, my delights and in everything that is mine. When I see he sees through me. He hears when I hear. He is living –very much living, intensely living with me. The whole world with its innumerability parades in me and he also takes his part in this worldly exercise. When I weep he is closest to me in my weeping heart. None in this world can know better than him, closer than him in my feeling that makes me weep. But he is silent and holds no opinion, seeks no reason, suggests no way out for a remedy. He is there in the midst of it. So is the case when I burst in happy moments. He does not make me happy nor does he make me weep. But in all my life-throbs he is there with me but without being throbbed- and never reacts.

But he has no preference. He never emphasises. I am not aware of him –but he is all my awareness. I can not be aware of anything of my life if he remains unwilling to savour my sense of awareness. At times when I'm broken –with the burden of my life's sufferings and is torn into pieces –I pray to God with tears in my eyes –and call for his loving grace-I then realise that he is also in my aspiration and moves God-ward with me –but to my wonder I also find that he –being in my very aspiration –does not appeal for any remedy. He throbs in my lips that pray but without words that seek. He is silent and unmoved and calm- generating refreshing air in my life.

But who is he then in me? I'm his life and he lives through me. I try to pinpoint his existence but fail. He is not an outsider and a separate existence. The only thing I feel that I have in me a centre –the centre of gravity of myself-my existence and he himself is traced in that centre. But again he is missing in my limited physical body. As I go on finding him by tracing the foot-prints of my feeling –the path stretches deep within me-deep-very deep-more deep that this physical body can stretch to. In this passage of my journey to get hold of him I am lost and losing my physical sheath I am landed in a depth and get to him. Oh! He himself is the depth! Suddenly I become vanished in the light of all the lights of life. I see myself –standing there. I am face to face with me and discover that I am the travelling divine from the beginning of time! It's a splendid discovery! Instantaneous tears roll down from my eyes in love as I know that in no moment of my life I am separated from God. He has been carrying me from all the previous lives like a mother carries her just born baby in her arms. The mother sways the baby for comfort and sleep-but as the baby while being carried is not aware of its mother I am not aware of my eternal companion!

Making religion with Sri Aurobindo?

2008-10-17T20:52:00.004+05:30

By what I may consider myself a person –free from all religions? Broadly speaking, the atheists also follow some systems of thoughts and belief that help them exist comfortably. It’s like unconsciously holding to the root of a sense of certainty of their existence. There must be an axiom which helps to prove other truths. For man this axiom is hidden and unknown to him. But he feels the urge to cling to it for existential justification. When it is said that man can not live by bread alone –the need for bread is more emphasised than other psychological requirements. But a deep insight into the needs of man reveals that the most essential requirement in him is his sense of existence. The bread is essential for physical survival –but the basic root of this survival is a sense of assertion of survival. For man this sense of survival is not merely sensory. It’s a sense that gives him an identity as distinguished from amorphous mass of life. He wants to see or assert himself as an individual that is justifiably co-related to that which is greater than him-his personal self. To be specific we may say that man wants to belong to a system-that sustains his existence. If he fails to understand that ‘required system’-he would find out one according to his nature and understanding. The scientist does not believe that he is guided by someone we call God. So he tries to discover in his own way the truths and powers that govern his life and the world. It’s the essential satisfaction of existential nature. There can be no sense of uncertainty in our feeling of living in life. If we are unable to find any –we go on creating or imagining one to adhere to. So –the most interesting thing is that an atheist also believes that he is driven by a system –and in his case –it’s not God. This innate existential seeking has necessarily a tendency to form an external system in order to get it complied with the inner urge. Externally this is the cause of religions to meet this demand of existence of human life. Man gets relief in the fold of religion; his all is gathered into a certainty. He is given a world he is able to believe in and gets the ways and means to walk on it with his convincingly secure feeling. In religion he is justified of his physical, vital and mental instincts and perhaps is better satisfied. It’s because the sense of control over the baser impulses helps man to enjoy more under sanction of the authority of his religion. So in religion only man gets a justified ground of existence and the rightful approval of meeting his natural instincts with control. And it is this religion that sets before man a higher truth, a higher way of life. So in religion man also gets an opportunity to pursue his higher urge. So basically in this higher ideal held by all major religions as districts from the impulses of lower nature –man finds a higher and vaster sky for his possibilities. There is no doubt that in religion man finds himself more than what he is ordinarily. Here in this aspect, the gate of original inner urge of existential nature is more opened and man gets more space to satisfy the dignity of his existence. Those who criticise religions forget that religion is an essential natural phenomenon of man’s search and fulfilment –and the consequent exteriorisation of the hidden urge of life. There is no denying the fact that it is the same religion that shackles, fetters and tortures man and prevent him to go beyond the established and fixed periphery to be otherwise for the same reason that is behind the growth of religion. Religion helps man to gather around a set of principles for grasping the reason of his existence but it never allows him to go outside this frame. The principles of life on which a religion is based –gradually turn into the rules of a structure. The tree now wants to explain the seed. The root of this contradiction lies in the overriding prominence of collective system against the urge of individual for further progress. The truth always comes through individual and through the individual it holds the collective group. So it is individual who whenever rises against a past dogma in favour of a living truth –the collective opposition (in the form of religion) stands against it. So we have witnessed in the process of history the battles between newness and progressive thoughts- and between religions also. As I have told above that we can not afford to be outside religions-of any kind for fear of losing truths that sustain us-identify us.

This is the apparent and external truth for religions growing strength in collective human groups. But there is a force and power behind the foundation of religion which is not physical. In all the major religions and paths there are spiritual powers that form them as new ways and influences for the world in given times through Avatars, Bibhutis and other higher mental or vital incarnations for the general progressions of human consciousness. These incarnations from higher spiritual regions are essential in the progression of consciousness in evolutionary process behind manifestation of higher principles of existence. But in the process of time all the new principles go on creating norms, rules, creeds etc because of mind’s ways to grasp the newness. Ultimately –it is the principle of mind and also of vital consciousness that are responsible for the creeds of religions or the religiosity. The truth has been asked heaven’s sanction for earth’s service. This degeneration of spiritual truth in the life and mind of human beings is best described by Sri Aurobindo in the following lines of his Life Divine. .”...The religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual.”

Now let us consider this aspect of religion for the devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But before giving any opinion we must compare some aspects of existing religious communities with that of the followers of Sri Aurobindo. Basically a person to follow and believe in the path of Sri Aurobindo for a meaning and justification of life –does not require coming into any fold of a collective group or community. Actually –there is no external path at all in Sri Aurobindo. There is no creed and we may better say that there can not be any creed and ritual for a person (or a sadhak) who are in the way towards Supramental consciousness. The follower of Sri Aurobindo –if he/she so chooses may live a life without attaching himself/herself to any group or attending any ceremony –even if these are in the name of Sri Aurobindo. A follower of Sri Aurobindo must shun all beliefs, notions, impressions and preferences that he/she has learnt from the society, religion, community, nationality. He or she must make efforts to be bare of all ideas –in order to help the Divine hands to mould him/her in Its own way-contrary to the ways as conceived by human mind. For the first and the last thing in Sri Aurobindo –is to exceed one’s own self –exceeding the very manhood for the attainment of Supermanhood. There is no specific ways to attain it. One must find one’s soul for a true direction and follow it in every movement of life-as ‘All life is yoga’. One need not de-convert one’s religious identity in order to follow Sri Aurobindo. One may argue that it’s true for all the true destination of all religions-i.e. to stand naked with God. But there is a difference here. One must accept everything that comes to him in the process of life externally and internally in order to transform them. It’s because this a follower Sri Aurobindo does not and can not have any defined form and status of his/her God. Because one must rise beyond the world of Gods and for that matter the world of mind. Sri Aurobindo –time and again warned and advised his disciples and followers –not to make any effort to understand the Supramental consciousness. One must surrender all of one’s life to the Divine. So does it not sound ridiculous that one’s surrendering everything to the Divine –is also a kind of a religion? Secondly –it may also be argued that a follower of Sri Aurobindo or a believer of his vision of future of humanity is not necessarily a sadhak of Supramental Yoga. There are innumerable persons who are believers of his philosophy but are not active sadhakas. These people are being grouped here and there in the various parts of the world. And as they stand distinctively separate from other religious identities –they are obviously be branded as belonging also to a faith –however great that may be. Whether we like it or not, they, by virtue of believing in a separate way-are helping to form another religion with Sri Aurobindo. But seeing it in that way is missing an important truth relating to psychology of religion. Actually the people belonging to this category are elites in psychology. The very elitism with the truth of Sri Aurobindo is a deterrent to religious movements. Unlike other religious groups they will help creating a psychology in favour of union of different faiths and ways while remaining unbiased above every divisive tendency. These groups of people having a mental inclination for Sri Aurobindo are essential for the hidden Supramental urge –for gradual building of a stimulating base for its actions on the sadhakas and also the humanity in general. But the people belonging to other religions may brand them as belonging to a religion other than the religions they belong to. But at the same time they will not consider them a community harmful to any religious beliefs.

These people will walk and move in the light of a higher consciousness and will never act with any religious impulse. Sri Aurobindo appeared to lift humanity into an integral truth consciousness from this divisive world of mind. If we believe that by accepting the teachings of Sri Aurobindo –we become a part of a separate religion then there lies a serious misunderstanding in our reading of Sri Aurobindo. If any religious-minded person does not feel comfortable amongst a group of followers of Sri Aurobindo then by the person’s religiosity can in no way establish a fact that by refusing to believe in the religious ways of the person the group has its own religion also other than the religion of the person. The Christianity was once enraged by the opinion of Galileo Galilee. This fact can not be explained by a kind of strife between two belief-systems. Galileo was not a follower of any faith in his discovery. He was mere aware of the truth.

Anirvan on Sri Aurobindo

2008-10-15T19:00:00.002+05:30

Sri Anirvan was a true and great yogi. Even in India –a yogi of his stature was rare. But few Indians knew him and in Bengal he is known mainly only amongst the circle of the devotees of Sri Aurobindo. It is mainly because of his Bengali translation of Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine. Moreover –his command over a language that could do justice to the mantric language of Life Divine-turned his readers to discover him as an adorable greatness in that circle. Otherwise –in spite of his other great and serious writings including his Veda Mimamsa –he would have long lost in oblivion so far the Bengalis are concerned. He was an immortal yogi but Life Divine made him an immortal writer. Even I know many Bengalis –who knew him as an Ashramite of Sri Aurobindo Ashram as one amongst the disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I myself was a victim of this wrong notion before I met him in 1972 and I got a bit surprised of his not being so. I felt to visit him only as I was a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Otherwise-perhaps I would not have felt any urge to meet him –even if I had known him as an extraordinary yogi. I was then mad to know more about Sri Aurobindo after the Mother’s touch. I wanted to go to them who knew Sri Aurobindo and the Mother personally. For the same reason I met Promode Kumar Chatterjee-the renowned painter and writer –who later joined Sri Aurobindo Ashram. After my acquaintance with Sri Anirvan –I became overwhelmed with his love and I got related to him personally. I told him all about my experience and my opinion about Sri Aurobindo. I laid bare my mind and heart before him as to what I felt about Sri Aurobindo in those days. There were two persons who had been sources for my life’s inner sustenance. They were Sri Ramakrishna and Rabindranath Tagore. But as I had been growing up I started to feel their limitations –in helping me to find the right justification in living in this modern life. Sri Ramakrishna could not convince me as to why I should go after God and how could I live a worldly life without ‘kamini-kanchan’ (woman and money). He uttered that this world is nonexistent (jagat mithya) and only the Brahman is true. His disciples were sanyasins- a fact which divided the two ways of life-where the non-sanyasins were inferior to the sanyasins in their way of life. I never fell from my reverence for him –and always regarded him a great spiritual person. But I failed to reconcile my situation with his ideals and teachings. So was Rabindranath-a worshipper of beauty who held an idea of universal humanity free from all narrowness. But he could not show any way to achieve it. He was apparently aloof of human destiny and the justification of living in hope and meaning. I told all this of my thoughts to Sri Anirvan. I also told him that it was only after coming in touch with the Mother I find the meaning and justification of life in Sri Aurobindo. He responded with a great pat for every word of mine. I should not take this opportunity to get flattered by mentioning his opinion about me in respect of what I told him about Sri Aurobindo. I need only to mention here that he supported every feeling of mine and encouraged and praised me for my opinion on Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo was the cement between our loving relations. There may be other subtle and hidden reasons in my inner relation with him. But it is beyond my comprehension.

For my reverence and love for this yogi-I was sensitive also about his writing on Sri Aurobindo –the person. I read all the letters he wrote in different times to many bhktas. From all his correspondences I came to form my way of ideas about his not being so vociferous about the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. He was a great yogi and it’s beyond the idea of ordinary persons about the height of his consciousness. If one came under his yogic influence or was personally in loving relation with him –he revealed sometime like a childlike simplicity his scintillating greatness. So he did not like to involve himself in fanciful or for that matter futile intellectual exercises with those Aurobindonians who in their real life had no spiritual experience in such very serious and complicated matters. He loved sincere people with genuine seeking but he kept himself apart from public discussions on Sri Aurobindo. Moreover his was a unique life and a different destination as fixed by his creator. He loved the mind of a Baul in his seeking –his Himalayan erudition notwithstanding. But it’s my presumption that his realisation of the Avatarhood of Sri Aurobindo came in his later life. But he did not like to discuss this aspect with others.

In 1972 on the occasion of Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary he wrote briefly on Sri Aurobindo. I am unable for my inefficiency to translate into English from his own inimitable beautiful Bengali –what he wrote about Sri Aurobindo. Perhaps it was his last written statement on Sri Aurobindo. I only mention below a few lines leaving the whole for my inability to translate. This is also not literary translation. I only keep the idea behind the lines.

“Sri Aurobindo was an Avatar in his human body-manushim tanum aAshritah. He appeared as a Divine Intervention. It’s very significant that India became independent on a day which was the birthday of Sri Aurobindo. It’s also significant that though he had been grown up under Western culture and education –his inner self was completely inspired by the oriental ideas and thoughts. His Divine birth took place in a particular place and time-India and Twentieth Century. So his thoughts and ideas turned into universal dimension”

Though it has been written as quote-but actually I have culled them in my way and not from a single paragraph. Sri Anirvan wrote a bit more on the personality and the significance of Sri Aurobindo’s life there but as I have said above that I have had to leave them for my inability to translate them.

After the withdrawal of the Mother from her physical body in 1973, Sri Anirvan and Nalini Kanta Gupta –made two statements on the occasion-from two different places. The words of their statements were not the same in language but significantly they were same in spirit. They saw it (the physical death) as an explosion of the Mother’s consciousness which radiated everywhere in the world. Unfortunately –I had not with me the statements as I write this. So I’ll be glad if anyone helps me with their verbatim statements. Meanwhile I will continue to search them in my records.

Birth of New Spiritualism After Three Thousand Years

2008-10-10T19:23:00.006+05:30

Some personal stray thoughts:

From my very childhood I have been inclined to spiritual matters. This is not to say that I felt god- ward emotion as we find in sadhus and yogis. Neither was I a spiritual seeker in my life. What interested me was to know how God exits and in what way he is related to our lives. This is also not to say that I had philosophical bend in my mind. I was born in a very spiritual and religious family. But as the family was deeply rooted in Sri Ramakrishna –we were not conventionally religious. Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda rid many Hindus –especially Bengali Hindus, of the debris of conservative Hinduism. The disciples and the followers of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were enlightened neo-Hindus then. My grandfather and grandmother were initiated by Sri Sarada Devi-whom we knew as Ma in our family. All the sons and daughters of my grandfather were initiated by this and that of the twelve sanyasin disciples of Sri Ramakrishna. We lived in Ranchi then permanently. My grandfather was one of the founders of Sri Ramakrishna Mission at Ranchi. So our house was frequently visited by the different sadhus and sanyasins and they stayed in our house whenever they felt necessary. So it was natural for me to grow as a strong believer in God. There was a strong presence of Sri Ramakrishna in our home. Sri Ramakrishna was our God. He was with us in every moment –in all the events good and bad. I loved him-sincerely loved him. I still love him.

But I had questions –which grew in numbers and in strength as I kept growing in age. One day when I was ten years-I suddenly got out of my otherwise normal calm mind and asked my aunt-a very devoted woman “If India is so rich and great with her Vedas, Upanishads, Gita-and with the numerous sadhus , monks, yogis and devotees sacrificing so much for the sake of God-why is this country suffering from poverty, diseases and illiteracy? Why are we lagging behind the West? Why Mr Morgan who has not even heard the name of Sri Ramakrishna –and without even caring God, can live so lavishly and why we can not, with Sri Ramakrishna behind us? How could it be possible for the British to be so mighty and wealthy, enough to be the king of almost half of this world while we Indians have appeared to be degenerated –so badly –that we are hardly recognisable as human beings as compared to them? I have serious doubt whether the Rishis and Yogis of your Vedas and Upanishads were wise enough in their vision of future. If they really had had the proper wisdom they would not have recommended spirituality-the most right path for us. Actually you have been worshipping false wisdom. Had they not the vision that their children would suffer like animals if they would sacrifice everything in the name of god?” By the way-Mr Morgan, an Englishman and his family were our tenants. We have two houses and my grandfather gave in rent one to Mr Morgan. So the difference of life styles and the standard of life of the Morgan and us was very much striking to me from my childhood. I felt confused. I could not ignore Indian spiritual seeking but at the same time I could not ignore her material suffering. There was another thing that I could not understand at all. Very frequently I heard elderly people seeking and praying for ‘mukti’. ‘Mukti’ (riddance from worldly life) was a very difficult word for me. I would think where one goes after mukti! But none cared to answer my ignorance. This is what I felt in my childhood. Much later I was put into many more riddles –the answers or solutions of them were not available from any quarter –materialists or spiritualists. I got so disgusted about all the unsolved riddles that it pushed me to think that it was better to be an agnostic or a Buddhist. I read many books on spiritual matters including that of Vivekananda. But the riddle of the meaning of existence could not be found. I’m sad to say that Vivekananda was a great man-and he appeared on this land as an epoch-making man. He was even an indispensible person for creating a spiritual atmosphere in India which ultimately helped preparing a ground for a sense of Indian nationalism-essential for seeking political independence. To read Vivekananda is to get awakened into a spirit to get convinced in one’s inner strength. But there is nothing in him that can satisfy that elementary question seeking the meaning and justification of existence-both individual and collective. Vivekananda was a force and an outstanding organiser but not an uncompromising seeker. He himself was in confusion which he was unaware of. He believed in the Mayavada of Shankaracharya but at the same time he passionately thought of the welfare of his country. He never was able to rid himself from these dual contradictions. Shankaracharya did not stand for Life but his follower Vivekananda loved Life-in all its aspects passionately. He could not withstand tears of suffering persons. He had a tremendous vital power but not a matching mind. Philosophy of life or truth never tormented him but what moved his life was the quality of life-especially the life of his countrymen. After Raja Rammohun -he was the second Indian to show India a modern path. This modernity was then a phenomenon in support of worldly life, an awakening to the values of material world. Vivekananda himself was the representative modern material man. But in his seeking for a truth there was no entry of the confused modern man. So I could not get shelter in Vivekananda. Apart from Vivekananda there was not a single person who wrote on the riddle of life and the future of man and spirituality-at least not significantly. So I remained a shelter less man even in my late twenties.

I wrote the above situation only to tell a little reality that concerns the conventional spiritualist and the scientist both. I have had to write so much only to say that if it were not for the Mother I would have been a sad atheist.

We all use to think of our habitat –the Earth being only a planet. There exists the whole universe compared to which the Earth is almost non-existent insignificance. The scientists have been trying to reach other planets for enquiry as if these celestial bodies and the rest of the universe lie separately from our own. Let the scientists go on seeking in their own way –as it (the Science) has its own values that affect our physical life. It stands in the conglomerate whole as a functional truth also just as we need to cultivate to feed us.

But –unfortunately after thousands of years from the rich past of the discovered truth –we, the seekers in the spiritual path still remain ignorant about the exact truth of this universe and the mind. It’s not a place to discuss metaphysical matters here but we may ponder over this matter as a truth of our life. If it’s necessary to know the role of psychic being in individual life for a devotee –then in the parallel significance it must be accepted that the universe exists but not outside our own life separately. It is created from within us or simultaneously in a single act - but we conceive it keeping outside of our understanding. There is no place to reach –as no place exists elsewhere. Actually –there is no place outside me. It’s only a question of stretching me if I want to have more or ‘different’. This is an old truth of Indian spiritualism.

According to the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram –the Earth is the centre of this universe and the very crucible of the centre of evolutionary process. I find that apart from their own sadhana and proclamation on the future of Man –the Mother and Sri Aurobindo explained everything of Indian spiritual wealth which none before them tried to lay bare under scanning wisdom and transparent intelligence. They have answered all the questions that may arise within a modern seeker for truth. And I am convinced that all will be able to rid themselves from the confusions I suffered from in my childhood. Had there been no Sri Aurobindo-the spiritual wealth of India would not have been re-discovered. He freed Indian spiritual wisdom from the degenerated garb of Hindu religion. He even paved the way for greater spiritual possibility for the whole world free from religious narrowness.

It took nearly three thousand years for Sri Aurobindo to be born for the establishment of true spiritualism which man needs most to find his existential meaning.

A tribute to Sachindra Nath Chatterjee

2008-08-31T20:02:00.010+05:30

Sachindra Nath Chatterjee It is almost thirty seven years now when I visited The Mother in Sri Aurobindo Ashram in the month of November. I stayed there for four days only. I was under pressure of very disturbed situation. But my days in Pondicherry (now Puducherry) passed with a subtle and hidden happiness. I am describing it ‘subtle and hidden’ as I did not feel it at that time but long after I had left the Ashram I felt that I had been enveloped in a refreshing delight. I went there with my wife. One of our relatives who lived near Chennai (then Madras) knew an Ashramite and so he wrote an introductory letter to him requesting to look after us during our stay in Pondicherry. So we met Sachindra Nath Chatterjee in his work place in Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press by the sea side. It was in the noon of eighth November. It was a momentous meeting for us. He welcomed us and accepted us instantaneously as persons very close near to his heart. As I am writing this now tears come up on my eyes as I touch him in his love retained intact in my heart. We were bound in a loving relation with him till his last days in 1999. He once told me that the relation had been continuing from previous births. In another occasion he wrote to me that if ever the relation was physically severed by his death the relation would remain with me for eternity. When we met him first he was then above sixty. I have never seen a person so soft and sweet-spoken in my life. He was older than my father in age then and I regarded him as my father. He was so loving and so dutiful that I sometime wondered how it was possible with a human being! He was always with us during our four day-stay in Pondicherry. All my worries and pains did not find any scope to enter into me eluding his loving presence. At that time it was very difficult to visit the Mother (whom I knew very little). So I myself was not interested to visit her but I was extremely worried for my wife who had chosen South India as our touring place replacing my choice for Rajasthan-only to go to Pondicherry for visiting the Mother. I told it to Sachinda. So he made a draft in English addressing the Mother on behalf of us and told us to sign it. After our signing he sent the letter to those who received such appeals and placed before the Mother for her approval. Afterwards on the day I came to know it was Sachinda’s birthday-the ninth of November. On my query whether the Mother would approve our appeal Sachinda told us that it depended solely on the Mother but advised us to pray sincerely to the Mother for a darshan. So I along with my wife used to sit near the Samadhi and looking up above to the Mother’s room prayed to her. In the evening, light trickled through the glass pane of the room where the Mother lived and looking to that light I felt the presence of the Mother. That divine light carrying the touch of the Mother trickled to my heart clearing all the dark lanes and by lanes and hiddenly inspired me to pray. Sachinda accompanied us always in the afternoon after his duty in the Ashram Press. He had a favourite place to go. It was on the road beside the Dining Hall. There were two houses in a garden surrounded by a high wall. The building was very old. The Ashram had taken a lease of the premise for the Ashramites’ living. There lived the poet Nishikanta with his sister Aparna. They were good friends to Sachinda. So we visited the house and also became very close to them. They loved us. There was a giant old Bakul tree in the garden. Nishikanta loved this tree much and called it ‘briddha bakul’ (old Bakul). The Ashram, as a lessee, did not renew the lease-hold which ended after the death of Nishikanta and Aparnadi. The Ashram constructed a big complex with several buildings called New Creation for the residence of the Ashramites. Sachinda along with others shifted to New Creation. The houses in that premise are vacant now and in a dilapidated condition. We were introduced to many Ashramites –old and young. They all seemed to be sources of inspiration and conviction. We stayed in Pondicherry for four days. But not for a single day Sachinda uttered anything significant about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He knew it well that we knew actually nothing of The Mother and the spiritual aspect of Sri Aurobindo. In spite of that he never told us anything about them. Actually in his conversation with us he seldom referred their names and the significance of their sadhana. I also asked him nothing about them. He told me that he had come to the Ashram much before Sri Aurobindo left his mortal body. So one day I asked him whether he had seen the light that was emanating from Sri Aurobindo’s body after his physical death. His face beamed up with a remembrance and told me that he had seen the light surrounding the whole body of Sri Aurobindo even after two days of his withdrawal. But only this much and did not show any emotion. On the eleventh, we came to know that the Mother condescended to allowed us to visit her at 9 am of the twelfth-i.e. the very next day. Sachinda was visibly happy and told us that he would meet us at Nishikanta’s house and accompany us up to the stairs leading to the Mother’s room. He told us that he would come at 8 am the next day. We reached Nishikanta’s house much before 8 am next day. It was a cloudy day and at 7.30 it started to rain. In ten to fifteen minutes the whole sky broke down with rain all over Pondicherry. It was so intense that it was impossible to see something at three-metre distance. We became worried and began to think of Sachinda’s coming in such situation. The rains showed no signs to cease soon. We were watching the clock almost every minute. We knew that the time on this clock was exactly the same with that of Sachinda’s watch. The clock at last struck eight and the bell of Sachinda’s cycle was simultaneously heard. He arrived sharp at 8 am drenched to his skin. He brought with him two flower-bouquets for our offering to the Mother. He saved them somehow under his umbrella. But he was visibly worried for us for the rain. Fortunately the rain ceased in five minutes and we started for the Mother. Sachinda left us near the stair as he had to go to the Press. We began to climb the stairs holding the bouquets in our hands. We had no meeting with Sachinda after that as after our visit to the Mother we returned to our place took our luggage and from there boarded a bus for Chennai. After returning to Asansol, West Bengal, I wrote a letter to Sachinda informing our safe arrival at home. In that letter I also wrote that our stay in Pondicherry for a visit to the Mother was futile as I had not had any significant impression from that visit. In reply he wrote that had he knew of my depression he would definitely have stopped my return to Chennai and would keep me with him for a day only to clear off my pain arising out of my disbelief. He wrote that he might disbelieve everything of this world but he could not believe that the Mother’s look on my eyes and her touch could go in vain. It would be revealed to me in my life sooner or later. It started to be revealed only after seven days in Asansol-thousand miles apart from Pondicherry. After this I always want to visit to Pondicherry and the Ashram, Sachinda and the Mother. At that time I could not differentiate Sachinda from the Mother.But my financial position could not afford me to undertake a tour to so long a place as Pondicherry. I feel restless for my inability to go to Pondicherry. I started to buy books on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I knew then about their sadhana and what for it had been necessary for them to come into this suffering world. Gautama Buddha was shocked to know the suffering of man and was convinced that to get rid of this suffering the only way out was to get rid of karmic chain to be dissolved in Nirvana i.e.to destroy the world. I questioned myself –‘Did not Gautama Buddha ever see a beautiful smile of a child? Did not he find the blooming of a fragrant flower? Did not he find the intense rain cloud in a July sky? Did not he ever see or hear the selfless sacrifice of life by someone to help other? Did not he ever hear the magnificent brave roar of a tiger? Did not he remember the loving look of his mother when he was a child? Did he find only the infirmity, decay and suffering –the only reality of this world?” Sri Aurobindo also saw this suffering world –no less than Gautama Buddha. He knew suffering in its extreme hell and found the root and remedy. What was the basic difference between these two persons that led them just the opposite ways and conclusion? One may just rightly provide an answer telling that it was as willed by God. But I like to add a little by saying that Sri Aurobindo was basically a poet. God had to have a poet’s mind to love his creation and so he wanted a LIFE DIVINE. I always involved myself in such thoughts. I told Anirvan-ji also my questions about Gautama Buddha and Shankaracharya and he assured me that I was not wrong in raising these questions. But at the same time he told me that I should do sadhana to prove it in this life. The Mother left her body in 1973 and I felt helpless. It was at this time Sachinda assured me of the Mother’s perennial presence in my life. He quoted the Mother to say that the Mother would never leave one whom even she saw for a moment. His accompaniment was for love and conviction to me. But I always thought of going to Pondicherry; it was heaven to me. I frequently saw dreams that I was going to Pondicherry but I failed to reach. Sometimes I was successful to reach there but failed to find Sachinda. I frequently told Sachinda of my love for him. Once he told me –“Devabrata, when you feel your love for me you feel the Mother only because she exists between us. It is the Mother whom you are feeling in me –I’m not a conduit for her love. She herself is the love” But I always felt for those four days. To me they were like a beautiful dream. It was unforgettable and like dream unreachable also. The sea, the frequent rain, the air, the Samadhi, the light of the Mother’s window ...all made an ambience of another world the kind of which did not exist anywhere in this world. Sometimes when I was intense with that ambience I slipped and crossed the boundaries of this life and lost in a white misty light-a place wherefrom I had come to this world. I wanted to get back to the place as I discovered the essence of Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the essence of that place existed in one single place. I was always inclined to spiritual things and the atmosphere of spiritual places and feelings as I had been born in a very spiritual family rooted in Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. Moreover I liked the spiritual atmosphere in many sacred temples in India. I could feel the presence of spiritual consciousness in India. This consciousness was soothing, calm, peaceful and other worldly. To me, personally, the physical symbol of this spirituality was best embodied in a scene with a banyan tree-standing near the bank of the river Ganga seen in the time of sunset. But it calls one to leave this world as written by Rabindranath Tagore in one of his beautiful poems for another aspect –“Not here, not here but in another place –somewhere else...” This is a very known and predominant mood of Indian spiritual mind. It has its own appeal-this saffron-tinged vairagya. I knew it well personally in me very well. But after my return from Pondicherry –I began to be filled with a completely new feeling. It was newness-its first emphatic identity. It was still inaccessible to me for its purity and newness. It did not provoke me to leave this world like the old spirituality but it had its own pressure also and i.e. to insist me to own it and establish it. It was very much refreshing as if a life giving touches. I now remembered that all this I had realised during my four day stay in Pondicherry but I had not been aware of it at that time. If the colour of old spirituality is saffron –then this new one is white. At times it was very pressurising for me –to turn my place into a Pondicherry-a fragrant Pondicherry-fragrant with the fragrance of the bosom of a white lotus. Thereafter I visited Pondicherry many times and enjoyed the loving company of Sachinda. Sachinda never tried to teach Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy to anyone. What he made of himself was the living embodiment of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. As I’m writing it I think that the Mother is sweeter than the nectar of heaven but in many parts we the children are more difficult than the denizens of the hell. These hellish denizens are hidden within the very cells of our beings. So the reality appears to some as the truth refracted through an impure medium. The Mother is sweet and loving but she is also absolutely pure. So we, including all, are tumbling at the intervention of this mighty purity. Sri Aurobindo had a vast mind and for the hunger of mind we love to read and discuss him with our mind. It’s quite natural and normal. But to realise the new consciousness of the Mother –one must find a path through one’s heart-what Sri Aurobindo named -the Sunlit Path.

Honeysuckle -Caprifolium...

2008-08-23T14:43:00.005+05:30

Geta or Getolina has sent the photo of another flower and written in the following words: I am sending you the picture.... with the text - "just discovered this marvelous flower... Honeysuckle Caprifolium... hm... it smells divine... and I am glad again that you like this flower... so there is not this flower in India... how pity... but there are other gorgeus flowers that I don't know. Thank you for your permission... I really enjoy watching at your creations. Maybe you know that there was a Romanian famous historian of religions, Mircea Eliade... he spent some time in India in his youth and even wrote a famous novel, here in Romania, Maitreyi... When I think of India I always think at his novel... the nature was luxuriant, too... and plenty of smells... unknown for a European.." Here ends geta's writing.

On further study I have come to know the following on the plant:

A beautiful genus, of well-known climbing shrubs, growing from fifteen to twenty feet high, some of them producing their flowers in succession through all the summer and autumnal months. They are all valuable for pillars, arbors, trellises, etc.

Many of the species are natives of North America; among them is the splendid Scarlet Trumpet Honeysuckle, a native of the southern states, but found to be hardy here, and in general cultivation. Its trumpet-shaped flowers are produced in clusters, of a rich scarlet without,and orange within; in bloom from June to October.

Caprifolium flavum. - Yellow Trumpet Monthly Honeysuckle. - This is also a native of the South, but long cultivated in Europe, and from thence introduced here. This continues to bloom all the season.

C. sempervireris. - Evergreen Scarlet Monthly Honeysuckle. - This is also a native of North America, perfectly hardy here; the foliage is evergreen; the flowers trumpet-shaped, of a rich scarlet without, tinged with orange within. The plant grows rapidly, throws out a multitude of branches, and has a singularly rich appearance, from the deep-green of its leaves and the splendor of its scarlet flowers.

C. hirsuta. - Hairy Honeysuckle. - This is a native of Massachusetts, found on damp, rocky banks, often growing to the height of fifteen to thirty feet; the flowers are of a pale-yellow without, hairy, and of a rich orange within; flowers, June and July.

C. periclymenum. - Woodbine. - This is a vigorous-growing English species; flowers pale-yellow, in June; highly fragrant.

The variety belgicum, or Dutch Sweet-scented Honeysuckle, is a well-known fragrant climber, giving a profusion of bloom in June, which emits a delightful odor to all the neighborhood; flowers yellow, variegated with red or purple.

The Dutch Monthly Sweet-scented Honeysuckle is another variety, with flowers somewhat like the last, but are produced in succession through the summer and autumn, until hard frosts. The buds, before they expand, are of a dark-red, or purple. When the flower opens, the interior is pure white, which changes to a cream color, and from that to an orange, giving the cluster a variegated and rich appearance. A variety has oak-shaped leaves.

C. flexuosum, or Chinese Honeysuckle. - A very desirable variety, with evergreen leaves, and delicate flowers through the season; stem flexuous and twining. Like many others of the Chinese plants, it readily supports the rigor of our winters, and, blooming with an exhaustless profusion, presents, from May till late in autumn, rich wreaths of flowers, various in tint, and of an exquisite orange-flower perfume.

The buds are purple; as they expand, the spotless white of its gaping corolla is exhibited, with its protruding stamens tipped with yellow anthers. On exposure to the air, the flowers gradually assume a cream-like tint, and, finally, a perfect orange color; and, as they mature in succession from the base to the extremity of the branch, the colors are all present on the same shoot. The stems and nerves of the leaves are purple; it is nearly evergreen. In rich loam, the growth is luxuriant.

Some beautiful varieties of the Scarlet Trumpet Honeysuckle were imported by us a few years since, that have given great satisfaction. One of the finest is C.floribunda, having clusters of large, trumpet-shaped, orange-scarlet flowers, yellow inside.

The White Italian Honeysuckle has pale-yellow, almost white, flowers. There are many other fine varieties and species of this beautiful tribe, but not much known.

My Aspiration

2008-08-02T14:35:00.001+05:30

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Do not interfere in The Mother's affair

2008-07-19T17:08:00.003+05:30

It is an irony that most of the people engaged in writing and discussing on spiritual matters do not have any spiritual seeking personally in their life. They only love intellectual exercises in such matters. They never think –what for such discussions are necessary to them and others. There have been people in all ages who love metaphysical exercises and many of them had important contributions to the subject itself. Metaphysics –in its own way helped mankind a lot. The very stuff of mind in man gets organized through systematic culture and disciplined methods in metaphysical matters. Idea and Reasoning –the two most important elements of human mind –can get sustenance from each other in serious metaphysical approaches and it is an essential evidence of the progression of the development of human mind. Man is after all the mental animal.

But the innate urge for spiritual truth has nothing to do with metaphysics. Spiritual knowledge comes from the direct touch of a living truth-whereas through metaphysics we may only conclude mentally the existence of a truth with the support of our reasoning faculty.

We have seen that some realized spiritual persons explained –what they had realized through their spiritual sadhana-in terms of metaphysics or philosophies. This –they did for two purposes. Firstly, in order to explain the process and background of their realizations to the people (especially the disciples) in respect of the truth. Secondly they felt that study of philosophy and shastra –helped sadhakas acquiring keen discerning ability to differentiate between false appearance of something by mixture or by manipulation through subtle sense faculties and what is real.

The Gurus in ancient India trained and initiated their disciples by infusing the truth of time-tested shastras with their spiritual aspiration. In recent history Anirvan (disciple of Swami Nigamananda Saraswati) grew up as a realized spiritual person –siddha yogi, through this traditional way of spiritual sadhana.

However –for a true and sincere spiritual seeker –it is not indispensible. Great yogis and saints appeared in India and elsewhere –from time immemorial –some of whom were even illiterate. Sri Chaitanya was brilliantly accomplished in his knowledge of shastras and metaphysics –whereas Sri Ramakrishna could barely read and write. But both were equally great spiritual personalities and possessed immense spiritual power to give spiritual shelters to thousands of people. I have written so much only to say that without the inner fire mere discussions of spiritual matters are useless exercises. It’s no way superior to the discussions that people love to enjoy discussing on various matters in Coffee-houses (like Calcutta Coffee House-the most renowned in India in this matter). Even the coffee-house type discussions may prove to be helpful to some philosophers, litterateurs (like Jean Paul Sartre etc in Paris) and students. This is because the subjects discussed in such places fall in the region of mind. But for a devotee, a seeker for spiritual truth –it may prove to be disastrous let alone not being helpful.

To ordinary persons-such discussions (or ‘adda’ in Bengali) are harmless. It is a sign of our shining minds. But when the same persons who feign as devotees and seekers in the path as shown by Sri Aurobindo –and engage themselves in mud-slinging whenever there arise acute differences in expounding Sri Aurobindo and matters associated with his name-we are faced with serious doubt about the chastity of their devotion. They feel themselves as intellectuals. But the most pitiful matter is that they are pseudo-intellectuals who do not have that mental ability or quality to grasp intellectually –how Sri Aurobindo- precisely, meticulously and with extraordinary disciplinary way using his reasoning strides for intuitive gallops (almost turning reason as idea)-established the Truth in his two books Life Divine and Synthesis of Yoga. There is an allurement in Sri Aurobindo-his intellectual appearance. So Tom, Dick and Harry of the West and Ram, Shyam and Jadu in India rush towards him and get engaged in intellectual exercises. They think that they understand Sri Aurobindo in this way. They are mistaken. Sri Aurobindo was never an intellectual. But –in spite of that he is regarded as intellectual. Sri Aurobindo was not a saint-not a philosopher and not even was a yogi. It was he who uttered this about himself. He loved to be seen himself as a poet. Was his uttering about his true identity mere romantic? It is more than half a century now since he left his mortal body. But still –in spite of all his subtle hints we –the ordinary people still in ignorance about the nature of his work and its fall-out and even if he was an Avatar –in what crucial way he was different than the Avatar-Vasudeva! He was a poet –kavi . A kavi is he who is a seer and he was a creator (kavi kratu). He and his manifesting shakti-The Mother brought down newness. A new world –they created. But it’s free from all old impurities. So to us who refuse to accept this newness altogether will see it –face it –experience it as disaster. The world is no more what we conceive of it now and continue to judge it with the now-defunct yardstick of old moral and ethical standards. Why so much stress was given by total surrender? It’s only because –we must erase everything of us –whatever there are we are constituted of-must not exist. We must create a pure blank of ourselves so that they can have that easier for them to create with us new beings. If for at any moment we think or feel that we are as ordinary beings carrying our individual habitual power, notion and ideas-we are not ready.

Unfortunately-after their having said, done and sacrificing everything of their lives for us the ignorant human beings-we sit comfortably in a coffee-house like adda-to judge whether the lives in Sri Aurobindo and Auroville are going according to our own conception of right or wrong. Sri Aurobindo once said that we should never criticize our motherland-unless we can improve it. Sri Aurobindo engaged himself in World War by sitting alone in his room in Pondicherry and guided the situations as he liked. I’ll request those who criticize Ashramites and Aurovillians –to change their way –if it is not right by applying inner spiritual power and not by conniving with corrupted politicians. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother always insisted on changing through change of consciousness.

Finally, the people –the self-appointed judges must think with their old moral norms that many of the Ashramites left their cozy affluent life behind in order to do sadhana. I’m telling of those young boys and girls who are Ashramite now. Many of their pocket-money was more than 50 thousand per month. They left their loving parents, brothers and sisters etc only to lead life as Ashramites. These arm-chair intellectuals must not have any right to speak foul about their abode-given to them –by their Mother. So let the matter be looked over by The Mother and her children of the Ashram.

I will ask these self-appointed critics to help us getting rid of the twenty-first century’s most dreaded enemies-THE POLITICIANS. They steal your money. At least Sri Aurobindo Ashram does not interfere in your personal matters and never has stolen your money.

Sunday wild & divine flowers

2008-07-09T14:32:00.009+05:30

This is a photograph taken by getolina-as she is known in Flickr photographic site. The photo was taken on June 8, 2008 by Canon PowerShot A630. Who is getolina? She is as she informed me in the following words: "Well, to begin with, I'm European, Eastern European, Romanian... so my mother tongue is Romanian and my name is Georgeta... shortly Geta getolina is a name I received from a friend of mine and I like it, so I took it as my name in Flickr." getolina is a friend of mine. She is kind, generous and a very friendly woman. She is also an extraordinary photographer. While visiting her photo stream I found this photo. Later I asked her-"Can such beautiful and soft flowers be wild? I have never seen this flower. But it's very beautiful. I only want to know whether it has sweet fragrance or not. If yes-then call it divine flower instead of wild. And you have made a wonderful shot." In response she informed -"Thank you so much for your interest in my photo. Yes, they are wild flowers, they bloom in Europe, in forests, at the beginning of June. They are the flowers of the elder bush, which can be seen almost everywhere in beech forests. They smell also very well... It's a kind of sweet and stringent smell... but powerful if you collect more flowers... And more... if you pic them, mix them with lemon, sugar and water, you obtain a very refreshing drink. And if you dry them, you can also make tea. I know, but I've never try yet that the black berries they have in August are very good also for making home jam. So, I think you are right... They are divine flowers... Thank you again so much!!" I fell in love with this flowers and so asked her permission in respect of publishing her photograph and her comments (in response to my query). She has soon permitted me to publish all this.

Judgement of The Mother

2008-07-06T15:28:00.005+05:30

Many years ago I came to know from newspapers when I was in Asansol that there was litigation between the Aurovillians and the Sri Aurobindo Society in respect of control over Auroville. It’s not my business here to go into the details on that matter. One of my friends who was very against whatever was associated with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother-taking a cue from that news told bad things against all of them and asked my opinion –why such things could happen with those who were the children of the so called Divine Mother! I was already depressed myself –rather confused and shocked, floundered for a speech in defense of the children. It was –as if an ordeal to me to save somehow the great names that were linked with the litigation as in some quarters there arose questions against the wisdom of such dream for a habitat of future man named after Sri Aurobindo by the Mother as-Auroville. Even it was criticized as a Utopia when the existing habitat of the Indians was in a shabby condition. However in my desperation as a self appointed advocate in defense of the Mother and the Aurovillians I retorted to my friend “ Do you think that Auroville will grow without troubles and problems-internal and external to fulfill the dream of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo-in the midst of hellish mud and mire of human consciousness? Being a devotee of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo-I was delighted to know the event of the foundation of Auroville. I personally cherish and live on the prospect of human evolution as prophesized by Sri Aurobindo. But I can not think that it will come without paying a cost or without being tormented at the struggle between the truth and ignorance within me. Auroville is an infant and is growing as pushed by its own soul from inside it. But it is growing from within us also-though we are not Aurovillians. Like a child it will falter and even fall and even move in a wrong way. But these facts of life can not deter it from attaining its adulthood as visualized by the Mother. And for us-who want to see Auroville to grow in a great exemplary way-must collaborate from outside. Did not the Mother want it from us? We should never forget that for a single fault or fall of a single Aurovillian –the responsibility lies equally with us also being a part of humanity. Aurovillians come also from the same species. Do not try to take the advantage of another’s shoulder for keeping your gun to shoot your target.” But after about forty years, while I myself have felt breaking down under the widespread news from both the print and electronic media that things are far from good with those whom I love as the most exemplary communities for our hope for the future –I prayed to the Mother in the same desperation I remembered her to my friend. After touching the birthday blessing of the Mother on my forehead I woke up in the morning and felt happy on the first day of my individual New Year. But after some hours while surfing the Internet I chanced to see several sites which were full of such information which could not be expected by the devotees of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. My eyes were filled with tears and I asked my Mother why such things happened. Could not be those people be otherwise? All the true answers come from within. None in this world can offer a true answer. We are never denied answers of our sincere and serious questions by the Mother. So after praying to the Mother I tried to become peaceful and calm. After an hour or two I just opened a book casually without knowing the name of the book and its author. I opened the book in the middle of its pages. I saw a heading-JUDGING OTHERS. The Mother says under it: “Unless your vision is constantly the vision of the Divine in all things, you have not only no right but no capacity to judge the state which others are in. And to pronounce a judgment on someone without having this vision spontaneously, effortlessly, is precisely an example of the mental presumptuousness of which Sri Aurobindo always spoke….And it so happens that one who has the vision, the consciousness, who is capable of seeing the truth in all things, never feels the need to judge anything whatever. For he understands everything and knows everything. Therefore, once and for all, you must tell yourselves that the moment you begin to judge things, people, circumstances, you are in the most total human ignorance. In short, one could put it like this: when one understands, one no longer judges and when one judges, it means that one does not know”. The name of the book: The Sunlit Path-page 153

THE ULTIMATE CROSSOVER

2008-06-11T18:47:00.003+05:30

I believe that man has not the capability to know the future-in the real sense of the term. It’s because man himself is growing into a future. He has the light of his intelligence helped by his inquisitiveness to create conveniences for a comfortable life. But this is not creating a future. Actually man does not have any belief in his own future. And in that sense, the word future has no meaning to him. Future is not a changed ‘present’. It’s newness. But the present and the past are not extinct in this newness-they become transfigured bases for the new. Sri Aurobindo told that man did not evolve from the ape. He supported the spirit of Darwinian Theory of evolution. With reference to Darwin Sri Aurobindo was not satisfied as there is nothing as an aim or direction involved in the progression of evolution of nature as expounded by Darwin. Sri Aurobindo could not accept that it is only with a blind urge for existence that pushes evolution. But whatever it is Sri Aurobindo founded his teaching on progressive evolution. He gave a face to the Evolution. But Sri Aurobindo’s vision of creation and of appearance of life on Earth was different than what scientists want us to believe. Science is yet to find the missing link between the animal and the animal-man. The bridge that helped the animal to cross over to land on manhood (Homo sapiens) is still covered with thick mist. The thread is not vividly continuous. There have been many conjectures but none has come out as full-proof. We –the devotees of Sri Aurobindo believe that there was an intervention, a descent to help the crossover. Let us see what Sri Aurobindo wrote in March 1914 while depicting in detail the process of the whole creation: “…..Man already exists but as a god or demigod in Bhuvarloka or Bhu, not as a man upon earth. There he is Deva, Asura, Rakshasa, Pramatha, Pisacha, Pasu or as Deva he is either Gandharva, Yaksha, Vidyadhara or any of the Kamadevas. For Man is son of the Manu and is assigned his place in Div & Pradiv, in Heaven & in the Swargabhumis. Thence he descends to earth and thither from earth he returns. …When the human body is ready, then he descends upon earth and occupies it. He is not a native of earth, nor does he evolve out of the animal. His manifestation in animal form is always a partial incarnation….. “How does he appear? Prajapati manifests as Vishnu Upendra incarnate in the animal or Pashu in whom the four Manus have already manifested themselves, and the first human creature who appears is, in this Kalpa, the Vanara, not the animal ape, but man with the Ape nature….. “These are man’s beginnings. He rises by the descent of ever higher types of Manu from the Bhuvarloka,-first as he is Pashu, then Pisacha, then Pramatha, then Rakshasa, then Asura, then Deva, then Siddha. So he ascends the ladder of his own being towards the Sat Purusha”. For the requirement of material vessel the proper man required an animal base for a descent. Sri Aurobindo thus called it partial incarnation. The whole matter is so complicated that it is beyond our understanding. Sri Aurobindo had a vision of this creative process in 1914 which he recorded in his diary. The diary has only been published in 2001. I have cited this matter for our other inquisitiveness which has been visiting us since the time of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The transition of man to superman. They also discussed it threadbare. The Mother had long discussions with Satprem in this matter of transition from man to superman. Sri Aurobindo wrote it in his Life Divine. From all their deliberations we know that an intermediary group of supramentalised persons would evolve. They will not be Supramental beings but forerunners. They will help creating the condition in themselves –so that a descent is possible. So here also lies the point of crossover. It’s too difficult and too early to have any idea. But for this one thing we may understand why Sri Aurobindo will be required to appear as the first Supramental Being. But we must not be confused to draw a parallel situation in the appearance of man with the coming of superman. The situations are qualitatively different. The advent of man was governed by the gods and their creations. Now after the descent of supramental consciousness –the situation lies entirely on the supramental governance. The Suprametal Body exists behind now. Man is left with no speculation anymore.

Devabrata wants you to join the party @ MyBlogLog

2008-05-16T17:45:00.001+05:30

Hey Babul's,

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Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Ashramites

2008-05-11T16:26:00.004+05:30

Sri Aurobindo was and even now is the most misunderstood spiritual person in India. And for that matter people outside Sri Aurobindo ashram do not have the right idea about the Ashram and the devotees of the Ashram. Sri Aurobindo was not a traditional spiritualist in the sense as conceived in the psyche of Indian people. India, from time immemorial, is the only land which regards the spiritual seekers in the highest esteem amongst the people of other pursuits. According to some spiritual persons India is God’s own home. In all ages and times thousands of people have abandoned the ordinary life and embraced the difficult path of spiritual disciplines. There were innumerable sages, yogis, fakirs and sadhus in the recorded history of India. But there were hundred times more of them who remain unknown for obvious reasons. Perhaps in every Hindu family in India has a sanyasin in its past.

So we are aware of the common characteristics of the God-seekers of whom we know by the words of mouth or by reading history. They all were visibly passionate in their seeking and were almost mad after God. We know this from the lives of Sri Chaitanya , Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, Swami Trailanga and many others. Sri Aurobindo showed no such passion –never in his life. He was an accomplished westerner, and so, many people are inclined to consider it an attribute of western character. Yes –Sri Aurobindo was an accomplished westerner but the life of his mission had no relation of his being grown up or being educated in western atmosphere.

Sri Aurobindo was never interested in spiritual matters exclusively for his self development. He never had any ambition of being a yogi. In his early period when he felt interested in spirituality –it was only because he wanted to acquire spiritual power that might help him to his fight for independence of his motherland. But this did not hold to his mind for long. He was soon involved in his sadhana for the whole of humanity. As per him this was also not from his own choice. He was chosen by his God for a difficult mission hitherto un-attempted –to change the fulcrum of creating consciousness in the world. Man has to move to exceed him. But this appeared queer to most people in India (I do not like to drag the whole world here). He was alone in his work. Nobody before him uttered such a possibility and treaded a path that could lead him to his destination before him. From his formidable loneliness –he wrote:

…We may find when all the rest has failed

He accepted this world as real as Brahma. But easier said in philosophy than done in life and guiding people to that end. So Sri Aurobindo took upon himself first the heat of that transforming consciousness so that it might act through the conscious sadhana of his disciples. The Mother appeared on the stage to help transmuting the new consciousness in the Ashram devotees. The Mother was the personified consciousness-shakti Sri Aurobindo sought to bring down. So the Mother established a group of people in a community for her work. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never had any intention of establishing an ashram in the traditional necessity of the term. They did not try to make the ashram people as good, religious human beings. Even they did not need God-loving persons as their devotees. They needed people who had inner call to do his yoga. That was the only criterion. They want to transform the evil and the ignorant base into the Divine Consciousness-the Supramental Consciousness as per Sri Aurobindo’s terminology. He knew the root of this unhappy and ignorant world and said time and again that and if we do not change from within we can not change the outside. Death is according to him a required necessity of ignorant and imperfect life.

Once the Mother, in response to a question, told, that her work would not be done with enlightened and elite persons like Vivekananda. They required the representative human moulds containing the inner aspiration to exceed humanity. Sri Aurobindo told that one must go through the hell in order to reach heaven. We must discover the evils within us so that we could transform it. To Sri Aurobindo-‘goodness’ was not the required element in a devotee.

An individual is not complete in itself. The collective is contained in the individual. So the ashram people are variously representative of the collectivity. And the Ashram is nothing but a kind of laboratory. The Mother said “You no longer do yoga for yourself alone; you do it for everybody, unintentionally, automatically.” Sri Aurobindo reminded us “Accepting life, he (the seeker of the integral Yoga) has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world’s burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others’; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world…” It’s a tremendous work and a devotee in the ashram feels constantly a tremendous pressure that is constantly at work from within and above even when the Mother and Sri Aurobindo are not physically present in their Ashram. Sometimes one could not bear the pressure and left the ashram. Sometime a few persons have become deranged or gone low.

One should, before criticizing the ashram people as not ideal from their customary impression, properly know for what the people are there. There are many good people in this world and many of them are even extraordinary in spiritual matters than we find in the Ashram. The distinctiveness of Sri Aurobindo Ashram is perceptible from its externality. There is no temple and none, as some inside such buildings, to worship. There is no such activity like bhajan or kirtan (devotional songs sung inside a temple). There is no guru or master for physical guidance in sadhana. There is a general discipline as is required if one lives a community life. One has to work in any of the various departments of the Ashram. For spiritual sadhana –there are guidelines as stated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in various places. Nobody is asked to follow the spiritual discipline in all sincerity as there is no such outside authority. It’s one’s own inner guidance that matters. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not believe in external imposition. One must grow from within. One may have all the facilities to pursue his or her creative activities. So far as sports and swimming are concerned –a devotee is afforded with the most modern facilities. The Mother insisted on sports and physical exercises as in integral Yoga the fitness of the physical body is essential. So except the samadhi-area one does not find any evidence from which it can be immediately perceived that Sri Aurobindo Ashram is a place for spiritual activity.

One must know what for Sri Aurobindo came to this world and should try to understand the tremendous suffering he had to undergo before trying to get any impression of the devotees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. If we have any expectation from others (as per our ideal), we should realize that one should not fire keeping his gun on other’s shoulder. If I can make a progress it may definitely help others even the ashramites to progress and vice versa.

It is not easy to simply live in the Ashram in its apparent easy life. There is the tremendous pressure of the Mother’s consciousness here.

The Veda and Sri Aurobindo's Light

2008-05-01T18:05:00.013+05:30

O Flame, O ray in our limited existence, bring for us an illumination full of utter energy, by an all-encompassing felicity cleave forward our path towards the plentitude.

- Hymn to Agni (Rig Veda)

She of the vision of knowledge, she of its flowing inspiration, she of its vastness, three goddesses who give birth to the Bliss, they who stumble not, may they take their seats at the alter strewn of the sacrifice.

- Hymn to Agni (Rig veda)

The Rig Veda rises out of the ancient dawn with the sound of a thousand-voiced hymn lifted from the soul of man to an all creative Truth and an all- illumining Light.

-Sri Aurobindo

Those in this world are unfortunate who have not had the touch of Sri Aurobindo’s mind. In him the East and the West found the best meeting ground. He was in every inch a realist and in the perfectly integral sense of matter, a materialist per se. He never followed anything with any preconceived idea or whose veracity lied only on customary belief. He had a mind of a scientist who never accepts anything without verification of its reality. So he was not warmly welcome to the majority of religious persons of India –the country, perhaps best explored in his spiritual mission as a land of Divine Presence. To the atheists he remains to be accepted as a great thinker or philosopher but is summarily refused for his vision of a future of mankind in a higher consciousness, notwithstanding his irrefutable logical explanations for such an unalterable destiny. Actually the materialists also follow a religion like the believers. The difference is that they are not aware that their system of seeking is also based on their absolute faith in the system itself –the system, Mind works with, under an integral process in evolution. The believers here in India are deeply rooted in Mayavada of Shankaracharya. So some believers even think of him as an atheist for his taking up of matter as something in the scheme of his sadhana.

If there can be any incarnation of the aspiration of modern man, then Sri Aurobindo was definitely an incarnation. He accepted with due regard all the positive progressive elements of modern man. So he assured his devotees that he had tested his every spiritual realization more rigorously than a scientist testing his result before declaring it to be true. He never accepted anything which he had not personally realized.

He was a pedant in the general sense of the term. But he never accepted that he would go to be known as a savant or philosopher. He wrote on many things of human activities. But to any serious reader he appears to be telling from his own understanding and solid realization. Sri Aurobindo –was not a scholar in the mechanical and current sense of the term. But if he felt a need to know anything for some purpose he studied the subject and became a master of it. But he didn’t study in the usual way. Whenever he took up something seriously –he went on researching on the matter. In this matter his characteristic inclination was more akin to western scientific researchers. He never insisted people –whenever he required addressing people outside his own spiritual community in the Ashram, he expected them to be rigorous in finding the real and the system must be secure and fool-proof.

So had there been no Sri Aurobindo –the hymns of the Veda still remain to be “the sacrificial compositions of a primitive and still barbarous race written around a system of ceremonial and propitiatory rites, addressed to personified Powers of Nature and replete with a confused mass of half-formed myth and crude astronomical allegories yet in the making.” Now it is for Sri Aurobindo with his scholarly and scientific efforts the secrets have been revealed before people. He refuted with his irrefutable light, Sayana and the later western scholars. Though there were three modern Indian contributions viz. Tilak, T.Paramasiva Aiyar and Swami Dayananda Saraswati but-none of them were free from conjectural opinions and can stand the rigorous tests that are essential in the matter.

Sri Aurobindo had –in his early period accepted without much interest the conclusions of European Scholarship ‘both as to the religious and and as to the historical and ethnical sense of the ancient hymns.” He had regarded as he had knew about the Rig Veda in modern translation as “an important document of our national history, but seemed of small value or importance for the history of thought or for a living spiritual experience.”

So what transpired Sri Aurobindo to be interested in The Vedas? In his own words he had regarded the Upanishads ‘as the most ancient source of Indian thought and religion-the true Veda, the first Book of knowledge’. He had been made to learn that “the Veda for the priests, the Vedanta for the sages”. Let us know how Sri Aurobindo had been drawn into the secret realms of the Vedas in his own words.

He wrote in his The Secret of the Veda,-“My first contact with Vedic thought came indirectly while pursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of Indian Yoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously converging towards the ancient and now unfrequented paths followed by our forefathers.” During this period of his sadhana he had been experiencing regularly, in him, figures of three female energies, Ila, Saraswati and Sarama-representing ‘severally three out of four faculties of the intuitive reasons,-revelation, inspiration and intuition’. He wrote that two of these names had not been well known to him as names of Vedic goddesses. He knew that they were connected rather with the current Hindu religion or with old Puranic legend, Saraswati, goddess of learning and Ila, mother of the Lunar dynasty. He went on “But Sarama was familiar enough. I was unable, however, to establish any connection between the figure that rose in my mind and the Vedic hound of heaven, who was associated in my memory with the Argive Helen and represented only an image of the physical Dawn entering in its pursuit of the vanished herds of Light into the cave of the Powers of darkness.” Thus had been the beginning of his search and subsequent research in the seclusion of his lone room in Pondicherry.

But before that he had been struck with some of his observation during his stay in Southern India for political activities which ultimately intensified his involvement with the secret of the Veda. It is always better to read in his own words, his own experiences. He wrote “Two observations that were forced on my mind, gave a serious shock to my second-hand belief in the racial division between Northern Aryans and Southern Dravidians. The distinction had always rested for me on a supposed difference between the physical types of Aryan and Dravidian and a more definite incompatibility between the northern Sanskritic and the southern non-Sanskritic tongues. I knew indeed of the later theories which suppose that a single homogeneous race, Dravidian or Indo-Afghan, inhabits the Indian peninsula; but hitherto I had not attracted much importance to these speculations. I could not, however, be long in Southern India without being impressed by the general recurrence of northern or ‘Aryan’ types in the Tamil race. Wherever I turned, I seemed to recognize with a startling distinctness, not only among the Brahmins but in all cases and classes, the old familiar faces, features, figures of my friends of Maharashtra, Gujerat, Hindustan, even, though this similarity was less widely spread, of my own province, Bengal. The impression I received was as if an army of all the tribes of the North had descended on the South and submerged any previous populations that may have occupied it. A general impression of a southern type survived, but it was impossible to fix it rigidly while studying the physiognomy of individuals. And in the end I could not but perceive that whatever admixtures might have taken place, whatever regional differences might have been evolved, there remains, behind all variations, a unity of physical as well as of cultural type throughout India. For the rest, this is a conclusion to which ethnological speculation itself has an increasing tendency…………

“And there was always the difference of language to support the theory of a meeting of races. But here also my preconceived ideas were disturbed and confounded. For, on examining the vocables of the Tamil language, in appearance so foreign to the Sanskritic form and character, I yet found myself continually guided by words or by families of words supposed to be pure Tamil in establishing new relations between Sanskrit and its distant sister, Latin, and occasionally, between the Greek and the Sanskrit. Sometimes the Tamil vocable not only suggested the connection, but proved the missing link in a family of connected words. And it was through this Dravidian language that I came first to perceive what seems to me now the true law, origins and, as it were, the embryology of the Aryan tongues. I was unable to pursue my examination far enough to establish any definite conclusion, but it certainly seems to me that the original connection between the Dravidian and Aryan tongues was far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed and the possibility suggests itself that they may even have been two divergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue. If so, the sole remaining evidence of an Aryan invasion of Dravidian India would be the indications to be found in the Vedic hymns.”

So with this ‘double interest’ Sri Aurobindo took up for the first time studying the Veda in original. After not a very long time he discovered that the Vedic indications of a distinction between Aryans and Dasyus and the identification of the latter as indigenous Indians was not as solid as Sri Aurobindo had supposed earlier. Interestingly, he discovered that a ‘considerable body of profound psychological thought and experience lying neglected in these ancient hymns.’ On this he continued with profound interest, “ And the importance of this element increased in my eyes when I found, first, that the mantras of the Veda illuminated with a clear and exact light psychological experiences of my own for which I had found no sufficient explanation either in European psychology or in the teachings of Yoga or of Vedanta, so far as I was acquainted with them, and, secondly, that they shed light on obscure passages and ideas of the Upanishads to which, previously, I could attach no exact meaning and gave at the same time a new sense to much in the Puranas.”

Thus was the beginning of the journey of Sri Aurobindo to the world of truth of the Veda. He discovered the truth of the Veda-the earliest literature (spiritual or otherwise) of the world. In deciphering the words he had to discover the identities of the Rishis and their time. So he took up the entire Veda in original and discovered the meaning of the mantras, comparing the root-words with Greek and Tamil, hitherto unknown to the world or known in ignorant and derogatory sense as some barbarians’ appeasing the unknown powers of Nature for material benefits. My intention here is not to discuss the secret meanings of the mantras but to highlight what Sri Aurobindo discovered in his research about the differences of so called Aryans and Dravidians and the North-South divide that have been supposed to breed an impression that there was no fundamental link between the two different tongues and races (Sri Aurobindo perhaps liked to use the word ‘ethnicities’). Sri Aurobindo studied philology and in his own way tried to conceive the intents of the mantras. He wrote that Comparative Philology helped a lot but in the present state of this science it was yet to attain maturity. He wrote,” Modern Philology is an immense advance on anything we have had before the nineteenth century. It has introduced a spirit of order and method in place of mere phantasy; it has given us more correct ideas of the morphology of language and of what is or is not possible in etymology. It has established a few rules which govern the the phenomena of the detritions of language and guide us in the identification of the same word or of related words as they appear in the changes of different but kindred tongues. Here, however, its achievements cease. The high hopes which attended its birth, have not been fulfilled by its maturity. It has failed to create a Science of Language and we are still compelled to apply to it the apologetic description given by a great philologist after some decades of earnest labour when he was obliged to speak of his favourite pursuits as ‘our petty conjectural sciences’. But a conjectural science is of no Science at all.”

So Sri Aurobindo had to depend on his own understanding based on his irrefutable logic and his overriding wisdom-still unparallel in this realm of the Veda.

I have had to relate all this to those who have not read Sri Aurobindo’s voluminous book-“The Secret of the Veda”. I have had to inform them the basic problems of discovering the secret of the Veda in absence of any recorded history of that far ancient era of human civilization and the absence of a well-formed and matured Science of Language. Surprisingly, a very recent revelation from The Indian Genome Variation (IGV)’s mammoth effort to analyse genetic variation across the Indian population has erased the dividing lines that separate caste and religious groups. The study by a consortium of six Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories and the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta has arrived through the process of their research studies that Dravidian lineages have mixed with Indo-Europeans, Austroasiatics have mingled with Dravidians, and bridge populations in central India are blends of Dravidian, Indo-European and Himalayan groups. Their analysis also shows that Kashmiri Pundits and Kashmiri Muslims are genetically similar and share genetic similarities with Dravidian groups. It is also said that some Dravidian speaking population groups have Indo-European lineage.

I have cited only the relevant portion of the above scientific findings to show that it proves what Sri Aurobindo, first through his intuition and then through his intensive studies of Tamil and the Vedic vocables (and through his sadhana) firmly established that there exists no such distinctively separate physical roots that may divide the Dravidians and the northern Aryans. From this it becomes evident that the two seemingly different tongues-Tamil and Sanskrit may have ancient links (as Sri Aurobindo showed in his Secret of the Veda) hidden in the formation of Vedic words.

After this startling revelation –the Science of Languages requires to be a true and mature Science (free from conjectures) as advised by Sri Aurobindo almost hundred years ago.

Finally I like to quote a portion of Sri Aurobindo’s letter to the editor of The Hindu dated 26^th August, 1914 in response to criticism of the opening chapter of The Secret of the Veda. Sri Aurobindo wrote,”…My point was that such knowledge, when it expressed a developed philosophy and psychology, stood in need of historical explanation,-a very different matter. If we accepted the European idea of an evolving knowledge in humanity,-and it is on that basis that my argument proceeded –we must find the source of the Brahmavada either in an extraneous origin such as a previous Dravidian culture-a theory which I can not admit, since I regard the so called Aryans and Dravidians as one and homogenous race-or in a previous development, of which the records have either been lost or are to be found in the Veda itself.” But I can not see any possibility of the coming of the seer and scientist-philologists in near future. Sri Aurobindo –himself already prepared a ground for them and indicated many results he discovered for the posterity. I’ll conclude with Sri Aurobindo’s comment on his own work.

“I do not claim that mine is the first attempt to give an adhyatmic interpretation of the Veda. It is an attempt –the first or the hundredth matters little-to give the esoteric and psychological sense of the Veda based throughout on the most modern method of critical research. Its interpretation of Vedic vocables is based on a re-examination of a large part of the field of comparative philology and a reconstruction on a new basis which I have some hope will bring us nearer to a true science of Language. This I propose to develop in another work, the “Origins of Aryan Speech”.

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