Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:06 am

35. BALARAMAN

Balaraman is a mirasdar living in his native village. He is devoted to the Mother. His entire family is devoted to Mother. His thoughts come to him as images; rather, he thinks in images. Whenever he meets me he used to describe the many visions he had. Some are of Mother and others are of life. I used to think the Rishi was in him. One day late in the evening he came out of his village house and he was struck by a vision whose immensity immobilized him. Standing on the edge of the road outside his house, he saw a huge light (Brahmanda jyothi). To his great surprise, it fragmented into a million bits of light that spread all over the world, and each bit lodged in one human being. He was overwhelmed by the vision, but by itself it explained nothing to him. The next morning the All India Radio announced that The Mother of the Ashram had attained Mahasamadhi and She had left her body at 7:30 p.m. the previous day. This news and the time of Mother’s departure immediately helped him understand his previous day’s vision. It showed that Mother had not merely left the world but was enshrined in every human heart where a soul lodged.

A trader used to visit his house periodically to sell cloth, particularly sarees. This man was known for a long time to Balaraman. Once the trader brought his son, named Tirumoorthy, who was reading in PUC and introduced him, saying the son would continue his trade from then onwards. The son was attracted by the picture of Mother in Balaraman’s house. After some time Tirumoorthy evinced greater interest in Balaraman as a devotee than as a customer. He became a devotee too and started visiting the Samadhi and attending Darshans. Tirumoorthy is one who sees visions very often. This common faculty brought Tirumoorthy and Balaraman nearer. Tirumoorthy was an ardent young man who desired to know everything about the Ashram, The Mother, Sri Aurobindo and yoga. He spent a few years listening to devotees, particularly to Balaraman, and avidly reading all available literature. He began to talk about Mother. Soon people found him talking only of Mother. A large contingent of young men gathered around him, feeling the same devotion to Mother.

Tirumoorthy brought people to the Ashram quite often. They were men and women, young and old, from far and near. People saw that he devoted his entire time with others speaking of Mother in great admiration and in utter devotion. God knows what happened to his business. Some felt Tirumoorthy had abandoned his business and devoted all his time to visiting the Ashram.

But the facts were different. His business multiplied several-fold. His standing in the profession rose considerably. He had by now earned a good bit of savings too. He shifted to Bangalore, collected a few lakhs of capital from friends and relatives, and started something like a wholesale business, supplying cloth to men like himself who sold in the villages. His income too rose considerably. Among his friends whom he brought to the Ashram were college students, traders and college lecturers.

Tirumoorthy was anxious to do service to Mother. When he came to know a devotee from Madras was sending rose flowers for the Samadhi on Darshan days, he too offered to send flowers from Bangalore. Mother had a special liking for good roses and white lotuses. Once Tirumoorthy came to know this, he started collecting the best available roses in Bangalore and carrying them himself to the Ashram one day prior to Darshan. These flowers were offered to Mother’s room, Sri Aurobindo’s room, Samadhi, mediation hall and other places of importance. Not content with this flower service, he bought lands in Pondicherry to cultivate flowers for the purpose of offering them to the Samadhi and Ashram. He once suggested he could bring a team of young people and offer service to Mother Estates during a cashew season. When his offer was accepted, he brought more people than the work required. Among the group was an M.A. who was unemployed.

This unemployed young man had applied to Canara Bank and UCO Bank for a clerk’s post a year earlier. At that time he wrote a long letter to me explaining his position. He sent offerings to the Ashram and received the blessings. He was very well qualified, intelligent and stood every chance of being selected as a bank clerk. He used to write quite often, that is, at every stage of his application. He was very anxious and impatient. But he was selected by neither of the banks and was sorely disappointed. In cases like this there is always a hidden factor, a higher factor. Man has not learned to appreciate disappointments. How can a young man whose application for a clerkship was rejected console himself that it is all for good, and that, maybe, greater things awaited him because he is a devotee of Mother? It goes against the grain. In this condition he too offered to come to Mother Estates for a brief period of service. There he met another young man who had just finished his B.Sc. and had come there for service like himself. On enquiry he learned that the man was preparing for the IAS examination. This put an idea into his own head, as he was an M.A. and was very intelligent.

On returning to his home, he waited for the IAS examination, preparing very thoroughly and with great care. He took the exam with confidence and passed it. This man, who had been sending me long letters the previous year during his hunt for a bank’s clerk post, now started sending me telegrams announcing every stage of his progress. In the interview he was not selected. But this time he was not fully dejected or completely disappointed. He gathered courage and decided to seek a job better than that of a clerk in a bank.

The State Bank invited applications for the post of Agent. He applied for it and was easily selected. The last I heard of him was his telegram informing me of his selection and his joining duty.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:07 am

36. THE GREATNESS OF SERVICE

It was the first time he met me and he was talking with great interest of many things. His manners were pleasant and his bearing cordial. His face was clear and calm. In the course of his talk he mentioned that he was employed as a car driver, which was difficult to reconcile with his poise, manners and appearance. Sensing my surprise, he explained, as if to clear my doubt, that his family had been a well-to-do one and later went bankrupt. They had owned lands, houses and two lorries. Now everything was lost, except the house where he and his elder brother lived with their families. I was sorry to learn of the family's misfortune and was contemplating whether I could offer any helpful suggestion to him that could restore him to prosperity. Unaware of my thoughts about his life, he continued to ramble on, in the course of which he said he had chosen to employ himself in a workshop of the Ashram, as it was a good place to work.

That clue gave me an idea. If he had been working for the Ashram as it was a good place to work, then it must be possible for him to regain his lost wealth. With this thought in mind, I began to scrutinise his conversations with me to discover what opinion he had of the Ashram, Mother, etc. To him, the Ashram was just an employer, nothing more. “Maybe Mother and Sri Aurobindo are great, but I have nothing to do with all that,” was the attitude he took. He had reverence for them as great people, but could not understand that his indirect service to them was collecting punya in his being. The punya was only collecting in his soul, but was not showing itself on the surface of his life as prosperity.

It is my personal observation that people who directly or indirectly serve Mother with or without conscious intention rise in their level of prosperity continuously. They may not even know that ultimately the work they had done for someone would reach Mother. Still Mother's Grace reaches them. The Ashram runs more than fifty departments and the inmates live in about 400 houses all over the town. Naturally, services of all descriptions are required from almost every profession. For several years in the beginning, I missed this aspect of Mother, the aspect of Her Grace reaching everyone indirectly related to Her. In later years when I began to see more of the Ashram activities, several phenomena explained themselves to me, of which this too was one.

I would like to refer to an observation from my own work. The villagers who came to our garden for work did not even know of the Ashram in Pondy, but if any man started working there, after a week his face acquired a shine. Constantly we heard of good news to his family. After a few years LUCK was thrust upon the village by the bank and overnight field incomes quadrupled.

An engineer bought a drilling machine and was hunting for customers. He drilled a well for us. After a year I happened to meet him with his bank agent and asked how he was doing. The agent answered on his behalf that in four months the engineer had paid ten monthly installments!

A contractor leased out the pressmud of a sugar factory to be sold to the farmers as manure. He sold us a great quantity over a year's time. He used to tell me that it was not a lucrative business, as he was compelled to sell his pressmud on credit to the farmers and they always left a good bit unpaid. He showed me once a bundle of almost 200 promissory notes due for the past 17 years. After his supply to us for the year was over, he came to settle his accounts with me and said, “This is a lucky year for me. For one thing, I was able to collect all arrears outstanding for the last 17 years. During the latter part of this year, I sold only for cash. The era of credit is over for me. I purchased my own lorry for this year's work and after a few months added one more.”

Another man was managing our gardens. He would never evince any curiosity as to what the Ashram was about. He would confine himself to the work in the garden. He had on his own a few acres of land and had dug a well there some years earlier. It turned out to be dry. There was no water spring inside. His was dry cultivation. His one ambition was to strike water, but that failed. After two years of working on the garden, one day he came with a beaming face and said, "Not being able to give up my well project, I once again tried to deepen the well this week. Fortunately I hit upon a big spring. It is a fulfillment of a lifetime's ambition for me. I wish you visit my fields once."

An agriculture income tax officer once levied Rs. 2,000 as tax on our lands. A sadhak went to his office to remit the amount. The officer said, "I know your institutions are working for the public. I was sorry to levy the tax, but it was my duty. Since I levied the tax, I was looking for some rule that speaks of exemption for people like you. Only yesterday I came upon that rule. Now I am happy. You do not have to remit this amount." A few months later someone who came from his office told me that that officer had been promoted as deputy collector and transferred. He added that as the officer was old, he had been expecting no further promotion in service.

A bank agent who took personal interest in our village schemes was given three promotions in three years, whereas normally one gets one promotion in three years.

To go back to my visitor now: I told him if he would try to regain his wealth, he would succeed. He replied that as soon as they had lost it, for several years they tried to regain the lorry service. Each time they tried, they failed and each subsequent time it became harder. He had lost hope once and for all. Without touching upon spiritual things, I spoke for ten minutes and said it was worth trying again. Towards the end, his interest seemed to have been sparked, but it was not supported by hope or experience.

About ten or twelve days later, when I was just entering the Ashram, someone rushed towards me in great excitement, walking briskly on the pavement, as if he were going to physically prevent me from entering the Ashram. It was he. I was interested. Without going inside the Ashram, I moved to one side of the pavement to listen to what he had to tell me. He burst out, "You asked me to try last week. It all worked miraculously." He explained he had been trying to meet me and convey this news for a few days, but had missed me. After leaving me the other day, he had gone home and spoken to his elder brother about taking one more effort to revive the lorry service. The brother was equally dejected and would not agree. Two days later someone who wanted to sell a lorry approached them with a request to buy. The conditions of the sale were favourable, the party was known and reliable and, particularly, the terms of the sale were such that he took over a credit on the vehicle and had to pay very little cash. The deal was closed. The lorry was on the road in another week.

A year later they had regained their original position, put two lorries on the road, and added one more wholesale business for the family.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:07 am

37. EYESIGHT

A good friend and a longtime devotee who is an agriculturist was waiting for me since morning outside my room, while I was engaged in a serious discussion with some Aurovillians. I had not known that my friend was waiting outside. I felt sorry and somewhat outraged that he should wait for me without informing me, as this was a meeting which would be prolonged for hours. Immediately I excused myself from the meeting and went outside to see my friend. I planned to be severe with him for not informing me and had a prepared sentence to deliver, "Why should you not come in and join the meeting?" On seeing him, I understood why he could not come in and join as usual. He was with two other people. One of them had come requesting a blessing packet from the Ashram, as he was going for an eye operation. He was a college student and a relative of my agriculturalist friend. I promised them to secure a blessing packet and asked all of them to meet me later. I had different ideas on his proposed operation than he had.

Later my friend and the student met me at the appointed time, and I gave them the blessing packet I had secured from the Ashram in the meantime. The student was not a devotee in the full sense of the word, but had accompanied my friend, who was his cousin, several times to the Ashram, Mother's Darshan, etc. as his native village was very near Pondicherry. He often visited my agriculturist friend as part of family work. As soon as I delivered the blessing packet, both were visibly pleased and were about to leave. Perhaps they were in a hurry or some other people were waiting for them elsewhere. On my enquiry they explained that neither was the case, but they were anxious to go to the Samadhi now that they had received the blessing packet.

Knowing their mind, I persuaded them to wait and explain to me the history of the eye disorder and gently hinted that the operation might not be necessary. My hint electrified them and they lost their hurry. The boy narrated, "From my early childhood I had no sight in one eye, but no second person could discern any defect in the formation of the eye. Over the years we went to several doctors. Each time I was advised to undergo an operation. Neither my family nor I approved of the idea of operation. Thus, it was going on ever since I was a child. I had never lost the hope of having my eye cured without an operation sometime or other. With that in mind, whenever I went to another town or heard of an expert eye doctor, I would contact him. Again and again I got the reply that it should be operated upon. Now that I am in this college and the volume of study causes strain to the sight, finally my parents advised me to have the operation. They took me to Madras, had me examined by an eye surgeon, fixed a date for the operation, and made arrangements to move to Madras for ten days. That was why I requested uncle to secure a blessing packet for me. I am very happy I have gotten one. Uncle tells me a lot about Mother and the power of the blessing packet. I have heard him narrate so many events to so many people about all this, but I do not fully understand it all. I too believe in Mother and have faith that Mother will bless me to have my operation successfully and restore my sight."

As soon as he finished, I clearly saw that his faith was pure, though simple-minded. It was obvious that my hint of avoiding the operation was of great interest to him, but his faith could not match it. As his explanation showed, his faith was there in Mother that She would help the operation to be successful. So I spoke as follows: "I see you have faith, but what the doctors have told you over the years has a strong hold on your mind. As your operation is not something urgently called for, I wish that you speak to your parents to have the operation postponed by a couple of weeks and try Mother's method. I will be happy if you agree to my suggestion and your parents endorse it, unmindful of the appointment fixed and arrangements made. Mother has a place here called "School of Perfect Eyesight". It is run by a devotee who is a famous doctor. He has borrowed some ideas from a New York doctor and developed a new method of curing illnesses of the eye. He bases himself on Mother's Force more than on his method. Please go to the school and let us know what they feel about your eye condition. Let us try and see. If anything cures you, it will be Mother's Force."

They both seemed happy. I could see in their faces some ray of hope that the operation can be avoided. On their part, both agreed to try, but had to consult the elders in the family. They returned after a few days to announce that their family consented, and they proceeded to the eye school. Later in the evening when they returned, they reported that the school had given them confidence and prescribed eye exercises for thirty days. The school asked the patient to stay in Pondicherry for the first seven days and said that if he learnt the exercises well, he could go home and practice. They ended saying that the school too emphasized that Mother's Force alone cured.

I could see that they were really satisfied, but the very routine fashion in which the twenty year old problem was handled somewhat mystified them. Fortunately, it had not shaken their faith.

My friend, who used to meet me often, was regularly reporting improvement by the treatment. After a week the boy felt a marked improvement. His confidence grew. He continued the exercises. Full eyesight was restored within one or two months.

My friend brought the boy to me when all was over. His face was full, his eyes were gleaming. After my friend finished speaking, I turned to the boy to listen to him. He looked at me with a full face and a dumb mouth. I could see his heart was too full for him to speak.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:07 am

38. CALLING THE MOTHER AND HER RESPONSE

Mother often used to stop Her work and concentrate for a second. This She would do during her writing, eating, interviews and any other work. She once explained that often Her children (devotees) 'call' her for help, to which she responds by sending Her force. One night at 1 a.m. She heard someone calling her frantically and she concentrated, then sent her force and 'saw' who it was. It was a man getting up from his bed, going to the door, leaning on it and calling her intensely. It was not clear to her who it was. The next morning news came. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Prime Minister, had passed away in Tashkent. Shastri had been in correspondence with her and before going to Tashkent meeting he had asked for Mother's Blessings for the meeting. He was devoted to her and it was his dying call that She had heard at night.

When devotees call, Mother gives two kinds of responses. One goes out of her wider personality without her knowing. The other emanates from her individuality. For those who are personally known to her and intensely call, Her individuality responds with her knowledge.

A boy of five years got a broken porcelain piece stuck in his throat and was choking. The family became panicky and a turmoil issued. Luckily the father was at home at that moment. As good luck would have it, there was an ENT specialist down the street. As the child weighed more than what the father could easily carry on his shoulder up to the specialist's hospital and no time could be lost looking for a rickshaw, in his fright he tried to lift the child, holding him around the waist, and rushed out of the house. The child was hanging precariously, with the father's arm around his stomach, and was bent over. The father's one thought was that the doctor must be in and give immediate attention. It would be a great thing if the doctor was able to recover the obnoxious porcelain piece by some instrument that could reach down into the throat. Otherwise, an operation would be necessary. How long would it take? How much suffering was in store for the boy and on his account for the parents? These things haunted the father's mind. He was an ardent devotee. In his hour of trial, he deeply prayed to Mother to extend Her blessings to the suffering child. His mind refused to wean itself away from the possible consequences of availability of the doctor, instrument, operation, etc. and fix itself on the prayer. Being a devotee, one part of his mind said that after all if any help comes, it should come only from Mother with the doctor only as an instrument, and therefore it is best to pray to Mother. But the human part in him refused to be under control. In this dilemma, suddenly he thought of the power of calling 'Mother' and began to call Her intensely. Soon his wandering mind came under control and he was able to call Mother from his mind. In half a minute the call began to shift from his mind to the heart. Within seconds he noticed that he was not calling anymore. Something from inside took up the call. A smooth, sweet vibration of calling began welling up from inside his heart dissolving his panic, fright, helplessness and suffering at the thought of the child's plight. Already the father had crossed two thirds of the road and was only yards away from the hospital entrance. The child who was precariously hanging from his father's arm began to wriggle and shouted, "Appa, it has fallen." The malicious porcelain piece was rolling on the road before the unbelieving eyes of the devotee. Mother usually answers through the help of the doctor; but in this case Mother's help came before reaching the doctor.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:08 am

39. EMPLOYMENT

"I am happy to inform you that I have gotten the appointment, after I met with a great disappointment when the list was published with my name missing. I don't know what happened after the publication of the list and how I have been awarded the post. Anyway, one thing is sure. This job does not come to me by the strength of my thirty years of service nor by all the influential contacts that tried on my behalf. Nor does it come by any desert of mind. It comes to me purely by Mother's Grace and I accept it as such," wrote a distinguished educationist of Tamil Nadu, when he was appointed professor emeritus after all his efforts had proven in vain and he had given up.

Mother constantly performs miracles in the life and faith of devotees without making them seem like miracles. "My gazetted government job is a fairly well-placed one and gives me Rs.650 a month in all (in 1969); but I know I have greater talents which if well-employed can give me Rs.1,000 in private industry. I was itching to get into a better job and intently prayed to Mother for a long time. I finally gave up seeking another job than this one. The very next day when I was on tour, an officer spoke to me of a public sector company needing the services of someone like me. While he was speaking, the man who gave that news walked in and was introduced. He said his establishment had interviewed 80 highly qualified persons and rejected all of them, as they did not have the one particular qualification they needed. I possessed it. I dashed to the company, where I had a warm welcome. After the whole interview was over, they expressed full satisfaction and asked me to choose my salary. I asked for Rs. 2,000 and they readily agreed," said a highly qualified scientist devotee of the Mother.

Mother gives whatever we ask for and often more. In 1982 a mother commented, "My son secured M.A., M.Ed, and is now doing M.Sc. He would rather take up a job than acquire a degree. These are hard days and life is full of cut-throat competition. Even those well-wishers who genuinely want to help the boy secure a job find it difficult. Finally I fixed my central reliance on Mother and did whatever we could to get him a job. Life turned around and every unhelpful situation slightly altered. All the people who had been giving an empty promise sounded sympathetic. On our part we shifted our reliance slowly from men and matters to Mother. At last, the boy got a good job, and the pay is over Rs. 1,000. In the circle of our relations and friends this is great news. We are unable to answer this question they ask: 'Who got you this post?' Not only for them, but for us also, it is a standing wonder."

A young engineer, after five years of service, rose to a position of earning Rs. 1,600 in a private company in 1974. He was ambitious and applied for a Chief Engineer's position in Goa carrying a salary of Rs. 3,000. Though he was qualified and talented, his experience for the post was too short. Before going for the interview, he came to me for Mother's Blessing packet. I got him one. He was not satisfied and wanted me to pronounce the outcome of his interview the following month! Obviously, I could not. He was insistent. Thereupon, I spoke generally of some practices connected with employment as follows: "You are young and this is a senior post. Of course, they have called you for the interview because you are fully qualified and talented. What Mother would do I can't say. I can say that whatever happens will be very good for you." He wanted me to be more explicit and asked whether he could do anything special, such as repeating a mantra or making a big offering in order to secure the job. I explained that though an offering is essential, a token is enough. If one wants to give more to Mother, it is to serve Her and Her cause. It is not necessary as an offering. Long-standing devotees whose children take up fresh jobs offer Mother the first month's salary," I added and left it at that. He appeared for the interview. Two weeks later he wrote to me that they had not selected him for the position, but added that he received by the same post an appointment order from another company for the job of Chief Engineer at a salary of Rs. 2,600.

I told all of this to a young man whose father brought him to me when he was seeking a job. This young man was an apprentice under an auditor. He didn't like it because there was not much scope to learn accounting under that auditor, as he was located in a small town and had small traders as clients. The boy's family had a lot of landed property, houses, a trade, etc. and he was seeking a job as he needed a career. In the early 70s when jobs had become scarce, I could not give him any idea or help in the matter. However, I said that if he had faith in Mother and related to Her or Her work in some token fashion, it would do him good. As he was not living in Pondicherry I could not easily suggest any service to Mother or to the Ashram. After some hard thinking, I asked him if he would come forward to sell some copies of a Tamil journal of the Ashram which was being published at that time. When he readily agreed, I made myself bold and said he would secure a job, if he could sell ten copies of it.

The young man went about ardently selling the journal and soon found out that not many people were interested in spirituality. But he was persistent and maintained his efforts. In the meantime, he was surprised to be called for interviews from many places, whereas up until then he had not been called. One interview was for an accountant's post in the Food Corporation. He appeared for the interview, did well and returned very satisfied. He was selected for the job and posted in the same town! He was touched and moved by Mother's Grace and Love, and exclaimed that he had till then sold only three copies of the journal. His enthusiasm did not flag; rather, it increased. One day he declared he was going to sell copies of the journal by going house to house. He sold and sold, up to 100 subscriptions and went beyond that too.

Mother's ways are many. One can never anticipate. The son of a Tahsildar was frequently visiting me ever since he completed B.A. in 1970. He continued and took his M.A. degree. He used to come to Darshans. One day he came asking me to get him a job. I asked him to accompany me to the Samadhi, which he did. I told him he could try for any job and he would get it.

After a month he came to announce that he got a Lecturer's job. He explained that they had advertised for one post. Several people appeared and a Ph.D. holder was selected. Impressed by the boy's performance in the interview, the interviewing professor recommended a temporary post could be created and he be selected!
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:08 am

40. THE GRACE THAT ALWAYS HELPS

About fifteen years ago I was seriously engaged in agriculture. Coconut and cashew were my chief crops. My coconut garden was near the seashore. The backwaters formed the borders of my garden on all sides, except to the West. People used to buy coconut husks in the backwaters and let them soak for four to five months. Then they would draw fibers out of them and make ropes. If such soaked-up husks are beaten with a stick, the non-fibrous parts fall down as powder on the ground and make good manure. Such manure helps keep the moisture in the soil.

The distance between the rope-making units and my garden was three miles. I used to bring the coconut husks to my garden by bullock carts and lorries. Neither the lorry nor the cart could come into my garden as the backwaters formed a barrier. Therefore, the husks had to be brought into my garden only by head load for a distance of two furlongs. A few years passed in this fashion. Then some coir workers told me that right in my garden itself they could convert the husks into fibers and make ropes. They also told me that this was a very profitable industry. I had a few husks soaked and extracted the fibers to practically verify their proposition. It proved to be true. I thought this was a very good way to get a lot of manure.

One had to buy the husks from coconut merchants. The husks were in great demand, as the industry was very profitable. It was the custom to pay the coconut merchants as advance the price of a year's supply of husks. I decided to start this industry with an advance payment of Rs. 7,000. I approached the biggest coconut merchant in the town and shared my thoughts with him. He took my Rs. 7,000 as advance and gave me a promissory note. He agreed to supply coconut husks and said he had taken an advance of Rs. 7000 from the co-operative society.

That year it did not rain well. If it does not rain well for a year, the next year the coconut harvest gets reduced to a quarter of its size. Therefore, that coconut merchant could not sell enough husks to earn the money due to the co-operative society. The next year also it did not rain well. It became plain that the merchant could not supply the husks I needed. So I went and spoke to him. He said to me, "You know the nature of the coconut business. There is nothing anybody can do."

In the meanwhile I had arranged bank loan facilities for the villagers of Ramapuram and had started planting banana, jasmine and Crossandra flowers in the estates there. That kept me busy, so I had no time to visit my coconut garden. Hence, I decided to give up my coir business and spoke about it to the merchant. He also agreed and promised to return the advance.

He was a big merchant with houses and lands as assets. His properties were easily worth two lakhs. He also had a money-lending shop. As such, there was no difficulty for him to repay my advance. Naturally, I expected to get it back soon. However, the state of affairs was different. The response of the merchant was not convincing. It seemed as if he was not willing to give the money back. He delayed for six months. Then I personally went to his house and met him. Though he spoke politely, there seemed to be no truth in his words. He said his father-in-law had planted ten acres of sugar cane and he hoped to repay me through that cane harvest. Those cane fields were in Pondicherry and, he said, he would have to get my money from the Pondy sugar mill.

I felt a little confident, as I knew the owner of that sugar mill. I asked the merchant to give me a letter asking the mill owner to give me Rs. 7,000 of the money due to him from the cane harvest. I thought I could get the money in this way. The merchant hesitated and refused to give me the letter. He said he would anyhow give the money from the cane harvest.

I enquired about the man from people who knew him well. They all told me, "You can forget your money. That man has earned all his money only in this way. Why did you give your money to him?"

Though I had his promissory note with me, going to the court was not appealing. I had decided to get the money without going to court. Then an acquaintance of his came and met me. He said, "You can go to court, but even then you won't get your money back. Before you take action please note the pros and cons of this problem." What he said stirred my thinking seriously. I thought of all the advice I had given to friends in a similar situation and followed them myself. But nothing seemed to work.

I prayed to Mother to help me get my money back. My prayer was heart-felt and I felt free from worry. It seemed like there was no serious problem. Though all signs were positive, the merchant still kept giving negative replies.

A few more months passed. The problem did not get solved. If another few more months passed, the promissory note would become invalid. I had to take some action before that. I started thinking seriously. Soon a friend came and sat by me. He asked me what my problem was and I shared my feelings with him. He listened and kept quiet. I thought of asking for his views on this matter. I told him, "You know that prayers to Mother get answered quickly. But, with respect to this merchant, it has failed. What do you think can be wrong from my side? I don't think there is anything wrong." He said, "You are wrong in having given him the money." I said, "Everybody gives him advance. He is a propertied man who has given me a promissory note. What can be wrong?" His reply was, "This won't work for us, it will work for other merchants only." When he said that, a simple thing which I had been unaware of suddenly dawned on me.

If I get a promissory note from people who are at my level, it will be honoured. If the merchant gives promissory notes to others at his level, they will also be honoured. As I did not have the resources to enforce his payment, I realised that what I had done was fundamentally wrong. With that realisation, I felt unburdened in my feelings. The problem seemed to be solved and a prayer seemed unnecessary. The first time I relied on my positive feelings, but it did not work. Why rely on them a second time. However, I placed my hopes on my positive feelings and decided to meet the merchant the next morning.

The next morning I left in my car for the estate in Ramapuram. On the way back I stopped to meet the merchant. My driver showed me a coconut garden and said, "The man dressed in a white shirt is the merchant."

I proceeded towards the garden and on seeing me, the merchant also began walking towards me. We met halfway and unusually he looked cheerful and spoke pleasantly. I opened the topic of money. He said, "The harvest is over. My men are threshing the paddy. I will give you the money this evening." I did not believe him and even thought of sending a worker to the paddy-threshing place. He asked if I did not believe him and took a paper out of his pocket. He showed me the paper and said, "Look, this is a list of all the people I am going to give money to this evening. Please see the top of the list." I saw that my name was on the top of the list with a figure of Rs. 7,000. He said he could not give the interest then and promised to give it to me at the next harvest. I expressed my wish to have my due in the form of paddy. He agreed. Accordingly, I sent my men and had Rs. 7,000 worth of paddy bags brought to my house. Just as he had promised, he paid the interest at the time of the next harvest.

If one is active, interested, and responsible and functions by basing himself on Mother, there is no need to pray. The Mother will help execute our tasks with ease. If obstacles arise, then prayer will move things. If things do not move, then it can only mean that something is wrong with our feelings, acts or way of life. If we find out that fault and feel sorry, then as usual the problems get solved.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:41 am

41. THE INTEGRAL YOGA OF SRI AUROBINDO

The world regards men like Einstein as geniuses. Men like Socrates, Bernard Shaw and Newton have attained the peaks of knowledge. The human mind has reached its highest limits in them. Human thought matures and shines through these people, giving illumination to the world. Great men of philosophy also merit this distinction. Men who offer new ideas to the world belong to this category. In life, the human mind is able to achieve this level. Beyond this, there is no greater level to achieve in worldly life. However, there are still higher levels within the reach of the human mind. They are not possible within the scope of worldly life. They are possible only if one takes to yoga.

[Socrates said:] "And now I shall let you alone, and proceed with the discourse upon Love which I heard one day from a Mantinean woman named Diotima: in this subject she was skilled, and in many others too....

“‘Into these love-matters even you, Socrates, might haply be initiated; but I doubt if you could approach the rites and revelations to which these, for the properly instructed, are merely the avenue. However I will speak of them,’ she said, ‘and will not stint my best endeavors; only you on your part must try your best to follow. He who would proceed rightly in this business must not merely begin from his youth to encounter beautiful bodies. In the first place, indeed, if his conductor guides him aright, he must be in love with one particular body, and engender beautiful converse therein; but next he must remark how the beauty attached to this or that body is cognate to that which is attached to any other, and that if he means to ensue beauty in form, it is gross folly not to regard as one and the same the beauty belonging to all; and so, having grasped this truth, he must make himself a lover of all beautiful bodies, and slacken the stress of his feeling for one by contemning it and counting it a trifle. But his next advance will be to set a higher value on the beauty of souls than on that of the body, so that however little the grace that may bloom in any likely soul it shall suffice him for loving and caring, and for bringing forth and soliciting such converse as will tend to the betterment of the young; and that finally he may be constrained to contemplate the beautiful as appearing in our observances and our laws, and to behold it all bound together in kinship and so estimate the body's beauty as a slight affair. From observances he should be led on to the branches of knowledge, that there also he may behold a province of beauty, and by looking thus on beauty in the mass may escape from the mean, meticulous slavery of a single instance, where he must center all his care, like a lackey, upon the beauty of a particular child or man or single observance; and turning rather towards the main ocean of the beautiful may by contemplation of this bring forth in all their splendor many fair fruits of discourse and meditation in a plenteous crop of philosophy; until with the strength and increase there acquired he descries a certain single knowledge connected with a beauty which has yet to be told. And here, I pray you,’ said she, ‘give me the very best of your attention.

“‘When a man has been thus far tutored in the lore of love, passing from view to view of beautiful things, in the right and regular ascent, suddenly he will have revealed to him, as he draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils. First of all, it is ever-existent and neither comes to be nor perishes, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not beautiful in part and in part ugly, nor is it such at such a time and other at another, nor in one respect beautiful and in another ugly, nor so affected by position as to seem beautiful to some and ugly to others. Nor again will our initiate find the beautiful presented to him in the guise of a face or of hands or any other portion of the body, nor as a particular description or piece of knowledge, nor as existing somewhere in another substance, such as an animal or the earth or sky or any other thing; but existing ever in singularity of form independent by itself, while all the multitude of beautiful things partake of it in such wise that, though all of them are coming to be and perishing, it grows neither greater nor less, and is affected by nothing. So when a man by the right method of boy-loving ascends from these particulars and begins to descry that beauty, he is almost able to lay hold of the final secret. Such is the right approach or induction to love-matters. Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of a ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies; from personal beauty he proceeds to beautiful observances, from observance to beautiful learning, and from learning at last to that particular study which is concerned with the beautiful itself and that alone; so that in the end he comes to know the very essence of beauty. In that state of life above all others, my dear Socrates,’ said the Mantinean woman, ‘a man finds it truly worth while to live, as he contemplates essential beauty. This, when once beheld, will outshine your gold and your vesture, your beautiful boys and striplings, whose aspect now so astounds you and makes you and many another, at the sight and constant society of your darlings, ready to do without either food or drink if that were any way possible, and only gaze upon them and have their company. But tell me, what would happen if one of you had the fortune to look upon essential beauty entire, pure and unalloyed; not infected with the flesh and color of humanity, and ever so much more of mortal trash? What if he could behold the divine beauty itself, in its unique form? Do you call it a pitiful life for a man to lead—looking that way, observing that vision by the proper means, and having it ever with him? Do but consider,’ she said, ‘that there only will it befall him, as he sees the beautiful through that which makes it visible, to breed not illusions but true examples of virtue, since his contact is not with illusion but with truth. So when he has begotten a true virtue and has reared it up he is destined to win the friendship of Heaven; he, above all men, is immortal.’

“This, Phaedrus and you others, is what Diotima told me, and I am persuaded of it, [said Socrates.]

-- Symposium, by Plato, prepared under the supervision of Lisa Cerrato, William Merrill, Elli Mylonas, David Smith


With the passion of a Puritan minister dispensing hellfire sermons, Shaw preached through his plays his vision of How Things Ought to Be. This included, at various times, such harmless beliefs as vegetarianism and abstention from alcohol, but they also included such vile beliefs as the endorsement of fascism and a blind devotion to Stalinism. All had a cynical edge to them, of disdain for lesser folk.

"Socialism is not charity nor loving-kindness, nor sympathy with the poor, nor popular philanthropy ... but the economist's hatred of waste and disorder, the aesthete's hatred of ugliness and dirt, the lawyer's hatred of injustice, the doctor's hatred of disease, the saint's hatred of the seven deadly sins." Basing society on hatred fit well with Shaw's disdainful character....

Although Shaw professed interest in helping laborers, like many socialists today, he confined his personal relationships to the intellectual and social elite. What friends he did make were primarily political allies within his socialist circles. He was profoundly uncomfortable around ordinary people, preferring words over actions and ideas over human contact when it came to helping the poor....

Shaw came to see value in brutality. As the old saying goes, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and Shaw wanted his omelette. He found a new hero in Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. Shaw would describe Mosley admiringly, as "the only striking personality in British politics." He also admired the Italian fascist Mussolini and, even more, the communist Stalin. Shaw visited Stalin in Moscow, in 1931, and found nothing disconcerting about Stalin's mass murders: "Our question is not to kill or not to kill, but to select the right people to kill ... [T]he essential difference between the Russian liquidator with his pistol (or whatever his humane killer may be) and the British hangman is that they do not operate on the same sort of person." The playwright famous for inventing Shavian irony would, without irony, recommend Joseph Stalin for the Nobel Peace Prize.

-- The Playwright in Spite of Himself -- George Bernard Shaw: Man, Superman, and Socialism, by Laurie Morrow


Oswald Mosley, the 1930's BUF leader, modeled his party of Blackshirts on Mussolini. He played a role in the "Hitler Project:" the installation of Nazism by the City of London and Wall Street, in order to bring about the mutual destruction of Germany and Russia, the two great European rivals of the century to Anglo-American hegemony. Research points to the conclusion that the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Fascists and Nazis were all countergangs introduced by British Imperialism to debase rival nations.

-- Obama, The Postmodern Coup -- Making of a Manchurian Candidate, by Webster Griffin Tarpley


Oswald Mosley began an affair with Diana Mitford the daughter of the 2nd Baron Redesdale, one of his wealthy supporters. Diana left her husband but Mosley refused to desert his wife. It was not until Cynthia Curzon died of peritonitis that Mosley agreed to marry Diana. In October 1936 Diana and Mosley secretly married in the house of the Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was one of only six guests at the ceremony. While in Nazi Germany Diana talked to Hitler about the possibility of establishing a pro-Nazi radio station in Britain, but it never materialised....Mosley appointed William Joyce, the infamous traitor who broadcast pro-Nazi radio broadcasts from Germany, and was known as Lord Haw-Haw, as the BUF’s full time Propaganda Director.

-- Life and Times of Sir Oswald Mosley & The British Union of Fascists, by Victor Smart, John Underwood Phillips


I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level, the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is no hereditary "governing class" any more than a hereditary hooliganism. We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality.

***

ANN. I love my mother, Jack.

TANNER. [working himself up into a sociological rage] Is that any reason why you are not to call your soul your own? Oh, I protest against this vile abjection of youth to age! look at fashionable society as you know it. What does it pretend to be? An exquisite dance of nymphs. What is it? A horrible procession of wretched girls, each in the claws of a cynical, cunning, avaricious, disillusioned, ignorantly experienced, foul-minded old woman whom she calls mother, and whose duty it is to corrupt her mind and sell her to the highest bidder. Why do these unhappy slaves marry anybody, however old and vile, sooner than not marry at all? Because marriage is their only means of escape from these decrepit fiends who hide their selfish ambitions, their jealous hatreds of the young rivals who have supplanted them, under the mask of maternal duty and family affection. Such things are abominable: the voice of nature proclaims for the daughter a father's care and for the son a mother's. The law for father and son and mother and daughter is not the law of love: it is the law of revolution, of emancipation, of final supersession of the old and worn-out by the young and capable. I tell you, the first duty of manhood and womanhood is a Declaration of Independence: the man who pleads his father's authority is no man: the woman who pleads her mother's authority is unfit to bear citizens to a free people.

***

THE DEVIL. [heartily] Have I the pleasure of again receiving a visit from the illustrious Commander of Calatrava? [Coldly] Don Juan, your servant. [Politely] And a strange lady? My respects, Senora.

ANA. Are you—

THE DEVIL. [bowing] Lucifer, at your service.

ANA. I shall go mad.

***

DON JUAN. My dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose heaven is like earth, where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I am going thither.

ANA. Thank you: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on earth.

DON JUAN. Then you must stay here; for hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heros and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, "Make me a healthy animal." But here you escape the tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, "the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on"—without getting us a step farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise!

***

DON JUAN. Since you have endured so much you may as well endure to the end. Long before this sterilization which I described becomes more than a clearly foreseen possibility, the reaction will begin. The great central purpose of breeding the race, ay, breeding it to heights now deemed superhuman: that purpose which is now hidden in a mephitic cloud of love and romance and prudery and fastidiousness, will break through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible realization of boys' and girls' dreams of bliss, or the need of older people for companionship or money. The plain-spoken marriage services of the vernacular Churches will no longer be abbreviated and half suppressed as indelicate. The sober decency, earnestness and authority of their declaration of the real purpose of marriage will be honored and accepted, whilst their romantic vowings and pledgings and until-death-do-us-partings and the like will be expunged as unbearable frivolities....

ANA. You see you have to confess that marriage is necessary, though, according to you, love is the slightest of all the relations.

DON JUAN. How do you know that it is not the greatest of all the relations? far too great to be a personal matter. Could your father have served his country if he had refused to kill any enemy of Spain unless he personally hated him? Can a woman serve her country if she refuses to marry any man she does not personally love? You know it is not so: the woman of noble birth marries as the man of noble birth fights, on political and family grounds, not on personal ones.

***

THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?

DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer....

THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Senor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on earth, I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.

DON JUAN. But at least I shall not be bored. The service of the Life Force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Senor Satan....

THE DEVIL. [gloomily] His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep these Life Worshippers: they all go....There is something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.

THE STATUE. And who the deuce is the Superman?

THE DEVIL. Oh, the latest fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish madman—what was his name? Nietzsche?

***

Every genuine religious person is a heretic and therefore a revolutionist....Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior.

***

IF there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Now this XVIII century god was deus ex machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the god of the lazy and incapable. The nineteenth century decided that there is indeed no such god; and now Man must take in hand all the work that he used to shirk with an idle prayer. He must, in effect, change himself into the political Providence which he formerly conceived as god; and such change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that is real. The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military and priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from Tweedledum to Tweedledee: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose [Google translate: The more things change, the more they stay the same]. But the changes from the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the house dog, from the charger of Henry V to the brewer’s draught horse and the race-horse, are real; for here Man has played the god, subduing Nature to his intention, and ennobling or debasing Life for a set purpose. And what can be done with a wolf can be done with a man....

The cry for the Superman did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. But it has always been silenced by the same question: what kind of person is this Superman to be? You ask, not for a super-apple, but for an eatable apple; not for a superhorse, but for a horse of greater draught or velocity. Neither is it of any use to ask for a Superman: you must furnish a specification of the sort of man you want. Unfortunately you do not know what sort of man you want. Some sort of goodlooking philosopher-athlete, with a handsome healthy woman for his mate, perhaps....

For example, we agree that we want superior mind; but we need not fall into the football club folly of counting on this as a product of superior body....If we must choose between a race of athletes and a race of “good” men, let us have the athletes....

No doubt it is easy to demonstrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it. No doubt, also, property has hitherto held its own and destroyed all the empires. But that was because the superficial objection to it (that it distributes social wealth and the social labor burden in a grotesquely inequitable manner) did not threaten the existence of the race, but only the individual happiness of its units, and finally the maintenance of some irrelevant political form or other, such as a nation, an empire, or the like. Now as happiness never matters to Nature, as she neither recognizes flags and frontiers nor cares a straw whether the economic system adopted by a society is feudal, capitalistic, or collectivist, provided it keeps the race afoot (the hive and the anthill being as acceptable to her as Utopia), the demonstrations of Socialists, though irrefutable, will never make any serious impression on property....

But we have now reached the stage of international organization. Man’s political capacity and magnanimity are clearly beaten by the vastness and complexity of the problems forced on him....

And so, if the Superman is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man’s intentional and well-considered contrivance. Conviction of this will smash everything that opposes it. Even Property and Marriage, which laugh at the laborer’s petty complaint that he is defrauded of “surplus value,” and at the domestic miseries of the slaves of the wedding ring, will themselves be laughed aside as the lightest of trifles if they cross this conception when it becomes a fully realized vital purpose of the race.

That they must cross it becomes obvious the moment we acknowledge the futility of breeding men for special qualities as we breed cocks for game, greyhounds for speed, or sheep for mutton. What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that when we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list of eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, or blemished without any set-off, we shall still have to trust to the guidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in the breeders and the parents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be the true characteristic of the Superman....

But pray are we to try to correct our diseased stocks by infecting our healthy stocks with them? Clearly the attraction which disease has for diseased people is beneficial to the race. If two really unhealthy people get married, they will, as likely as not, have a great number of children who will all die before they reach maturity. This is a far more satisfactory arrangement than the tragedy of a union between a healthy and an unhealthy person. Though more costly than sterilization of the unhealthy, it has the enormous advantage that in the event of our notions of health and unhealth being erroneous (which to some extent they most certainly are), the error will be corrected by experience instead of confirmed by evasion.

One fact must be faced resolutely, in spite of the shrieks of the romantic. There is no evidence that the best citizens are the offspring of congenial marriages, or that a conflict of temperament is not a highly important part of what breeders call crossing....But mating such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. But mating such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. In conjugation two complementary persons may supply one another’s deficiencies: in the domestic partnership of marriage they only feel them and suffer from them. Thus the son of a robust, cheerful, eupeptic British country squire, with the tastes and range of his class, and of a clever, imaginative, intellectual, highly civilized Jewess, might be very superior to both his parents; but it is not likely that the Jewess would find the squire an interesting companion, or his habits, his friends, his place and mode of life congenial to her. Therefore marriage, whilst it is made an indispensable condition of mating, will delay the advent of the Superman as effectually as Property, and will be modified by the impulse towards him just as effectually....

At certain moments there may even be a considerable material advance, as when the conquest of political power by the working class produces a better distribution of wealth through the simple action of the selfishness of the new masters; but all this is mere readjustment and reformation: until the heart and mind of the people is changed the very greatest man will no more dare to govern on the assumption that all are as great as he than a drover dare leave his flock to find its way through the streets as he himself would. Until there is an England in which every man is a Cromwell, a France in which every man is a Napoleon, a Rome in which every man is a Cæsar, a Germany in which every man is a Luther plus a Goethe, the world will be no more improved by its heroes than a Brixton villa is improved by the pyramid of Cheops. The production of such nations is the only real change possible to us....

The need for the Superman is, in its most imperative aspect, a political one. We have been driven to Proletarian Democracy by the failure of all the alternative systems; for these depended on the existence of Supermen acting as despots or oligarchs; and not only were these Supermen not always or even often forthcoming at the right moment and in an eligible social position, but when they were forthcoming they could not, except for a short time and by morally suicidal coercive methods, impose superhumanity on those whom they governed; so, by mere force of “human nature,” government by consent of the governed has supplanted the old plan of governing the citizen as a public-schoolboy is governed....

At all events Australia and Canada, which are virtually protected democratic republics, and France and the United States, which are avowedly independent democratic republics, are neither healthy, wealthy, nor wise; and they would be worse instead of better if their popular ministers were not experts in the art of dodging popular enthusiasms and duping popular ignorance....

The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man: in other terms, of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the commonwealth....

That may mean that we must establish a State Department of Evolution, with a seat in the Cabinet for its chief, and a revenue to defray the cost of direct State experiments, and provide inducements to private persons to achieve successful results. It may mean a private society or a chartered company for the improvement of human live stock. But for the present it is far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation of such proposals as indecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a general secret pushing of the human will in the repudiated direction; so that all sorts of institutions and public authorities will under some pretext or other feel their way furtively towards the Superman. Mr. Graham Wallas has already ventured to suggest, as Chairman of the School Management Committee of the London School Board, that the accepted policy of the Sterilization of the Schoolmistress, however administratively convenient, is open to criticism from the national stock-breeding point of view; and this is as good an example as any of the way in which the drift towards the Superman may operate in spite of all our hypocrisies....

Even a joint stock human stud farm (piously disguised as a reformed Foundling Hospital or something of that sort) might well, under proper inspection and regulation, produce better results than our present reliance on promiscuous marriage. It may be objected that when an ordinary contractor produces stores for sale to the Government, and the Government rejects them as not up to the required standard, the condemned goods are either sold for what they will fetch or else scrapped: that is, treated as waste material; whereas if the goods consisted of human beings, all that could be done would be to let them loose or send them to the nearest workhouse. But there is nothing new in private enterprise throwing its human refuse on the cheap labor market and the workhouse; and the refuse of the new industry would presumably be better bred than the staple product of ordinary poverty....

It will have to be handled by statesmen with character enough to tell our democracy and plutocracy that statecraft does not consist in flattering their follies or applying their suburban standards of propriety to the affairs of four continents. The matter must be taken up either by the State or by some organization strong enough to impose respect upon the State....

Let those who think the whole conception of intelligent breeding absurd and scandalous ask themselves why George IV was not allowed to choose his own wife whilst any tinker could marry whom he pleased? Simply because it did not matter a rap politically whom the tinker married, whereas it mattered very much whom the king married. The way in which all considerations of the king’s personal rights, of the claims of the heart, of the sanctity of the marriage oath, and of romantic morality crumpled up before this political need shews how negligible all these apparently irresistible prejudices are when they come into conflict with the demand for quality in our rulers. We learn the same lesson from the case of the soldier, whose marriage, when it is permitted at all, is despotically controlled with a view solely to military efficiency....

On the other hand a sense of the social importance of the tinker’s marriage has been steadily growing. We have made a public matter of his wife’s health in the month after her confinement. We have taken the minds of his children out of his hands and put them into those of our State schoolmaster. We shall presently make their bodily nourishment independent of him. But they are still riff-raff; and to hand the country over to riff-raff is national suicide, since riff-raff can neither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest bidder of bread and circuses. There is no public enthusiast alive of twenty years’ practical democratic experience who believes in the political adequacy of the electorate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman. Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves and desires a pedigree....

A conference on the subject is the next step needed. It will be attended by men and women who, no longer believing that they can live for ever, are seeking for some immortal work into which they can build the best of themselves before their refuse is thrown into that arch dust destructor, the cremation furnace.

-- Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, by Bernard Shaw


NEWTON: A CULTIST KOOK

The next phase of the corruption of science by Venice depends on a rather obscure Cambridge don by the name of Isaac Newton. For the oligarchy, Newton and Galileo are the only two contenders for the honor of being the most influential thinkers of their faction since Aristotle himself. The British oligarchy praises Newton as the founder of modern science. But, at the same time, they have been unable to keep secret the fact that Newton was a raving irrationalist, a cultist kook. Among the oligarchs, it was the British economist Lord John Maynard Keynes and a fellow Cambridge graduate who began to open the black box of Newton's real character. Was Newton the first and greatest of the modern scientists, the practitioner of cold and untinctured reason? No, said Keynes, Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last wonderful child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage. Keynes based his view on the contents of a box. What was in the box? The box contained papers which Newton had packed up when he left Cambridge for London in 1696, ending his Cambridge career and beginning his new life in London as member and president of the British Royal Society, director of the mint, resident magus of the new British Empire.

Inside the box were manuscripts and papers totaling some 1.2 million words. After Newton's death, Bishop Horsley was asked to inspect the box, with a view to publication, but when he saw the contents, he recoiled in horror and slammed the lid. A century passed. Newton's nineteenth-century biographer, Sir David Brewster, looked into the box. He decided to save Newton's reputation by printing a few selections, but he falsified the rest with straight fibbing, as Keynes says. The box became known as the Portsmouth Papers. A few mathematical papers were given to Cambridge in 1888. In 1936, the current owner, Lord Lymington, needed money, so he had the rest auctioned off. Keynes bought as many as he could, but other papers were scattered from Jerusalem to America.

As Keynes points out, Newton was a suspicious, paranoid, unstable personality. In 1692, Newton had a nervous breakdown and never regained his former consistency of mind. Pepys and Locke thought that he had become deranged. Newton emerged from his breakdown slightly "gaga." As Keynes stresses, Newton "was wholly aloof from women," although he had some close young male friends. He once angrily accused John Locke of trying to embroil him with women.

In the past decades, the lid of the box has been partially and grudgingly opened by the Anglophile scholars who are the keepers of the Newton myth. What can we see inside the box?

First, Newton was a supporter of the Arian heresy. He denied and attacked the Holy Trinity, and therefore also the Filioque and the concept of Imago Viva Dei. Keynes thought that Newton was "a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides," which suggests that he was a Cabalist. For Newton, to worship Christ as God was idolatry and a mortal sin. Even in the Church of England, Newton had to keep these views secret or face ostracism.

ALCHEMY AND GREEN LIONS

Newton's real interest was not mathematics or astronomy. It was alchemy. His laboratory at Trinity College, Cambridge was fitted out for alchemy. Here, his friends said, the fires never went out during six weeks of the spring and six weeks of the autumn. And what is alchemy? What kind of research was Newton doing? His sources were books like the "Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum" of Elias Ashmole, the Rosicrucian leader of British speculative Freemasonry. Newton owned all six heavy quarto volumes of Ashmole.

The goal of the alchemists was the quest for the mythical philosopher's stone, which would permit the alchemist to transmute lead and other base metals into gold. The alchemists hoped the philosopher's stone would give them other magical powers, such as rejuvenation and eternal youth.

Alchemy also involved the relations between the astrological influences of the planets and the behavior of chemicals. One treatise that dealt with these issues was the "Metamorphosis of the Planets." [by Johannes de Monte-Snyder] Since the planet Jupiter had precedence among the planets, it also occupied a privileged position among the reagents of alchemy. Newton expressed this with a picture he drew of Jupiter Enthroned on the obverse of the title page of this book.

What were Newton's findings? Let him speak for himself: "Concerning Magnesia of the green Lion. It is called Prometheus & the Chameleon. Also Androgyne, and virgin verdant earth in which the Sun has never cast its rays although he is its father and the moon its mother. Also common mercury, dew of heaven which makes the earth fertile, nitre of the wise. Instructio de arbore solari. It is the Saturnine stone." This would appear to have been written in the 1670s. A sample from the 1690s: "Now this green earth is the Green Ladies of B. Valentine the beautifully green Venus and the green Venereal emerald and green earth of Snyders with which he fed his lunary Mercury and by virtue of which Diana was to bring forth children and out of which saith Ripley the blood of the green Lyon is drawn in the beginning of the work."

During the 1680s Newton also composed a series of aphorisms of alchemy, the sixth of which reads as follows: "The young new born king is nourished in a bigger heat with milk drawn by destellation from the putrefied matter of the second work. With this milk he must be imbibed seven times to putrefy him sufficiently and then dococted to the white and red, and in passing to the red he must be imbibed with a little red oil to fortify the solary nature and make the red stone more fluxible. And this may be called the third work. The first goes on no further than to putrefaction, the second goes to the white and the third to the red." (Westfall, pp. 292, 293, 358).

And so it goes for more than a million words, with Green Lions, Androgynes, male and female principles, Pan and Osiris. Truly it has been said that Newton had probed the literature of alchemy as it had never been probed before or since, all during the time he was supposedly writing his Principia Mathematica. In addition, he drew up plans for King Solomon's Temple, and later a chronology of Biblical events which foreshortened that history by cutting out several hundred years.

NEWTON'S "DISCOVERIES"

And what about Newton's supposed discoveries? Upon closer scrutiny, it turns out that he had no discoveries. Take, for example, Newton's alleged law of universal gravitation, which states that the force of attraction of two point masses is equal to the product of the two masses divided by the square of the distance between them, times a constant. This is Newton's so-called inverse square law. It has long been known that this was not really a new discovery, but rather derived by some tinkering from Kepler's Third Law. Kepler had established that the cube of a planet's distance from the Sun divided by the square of its year always equaled a constant. By supplementing this with Huygens's formula for centrifugal acceleration and making some substitutions, you can obtain the inverse square relationship. This issue is settled in the appendices to The Science of Christian Economy [by Lyndon LaRouche, Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1991]. But the partisans of Newton still claim that Newton explained gravity.

By opening the lid of the box, we find that Newton himself confesses, in an unpublished note, that his great achievement was cribbed from Kepler. Newton wrote: "...I began to think of gravity extending to the Orb of the Moon and (having found out how to estimate the force with which a globe revolving presses the surface of a sphere) from Kepler's rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the center of their Orbs, I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve...." (Westfall, 143). Newton "arrived at the inverse square relation by substituting Kepler's Third Law into Huygens's recently published formula for centrifugal force" (Westfall, 402). Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren claimed to have done the same thing at about the same time.

Newton's love of alchemy and magic surfaces as the basis of his outlook, including in his supposed scientific writings. In his "Opticks," he asks, "Have not the small particles of bodies certain powers, virtues, or forces, by which they act at a distance.... How those attractions may be performed, I do not here consider. What I call attraction may be performed by Impulse, or some other means unknown to me." This is Newton's notion of gravity as action at a distance, which Leibniz rightly mocked as black magic. Newton's system was unable to describe anything beyond the interaction of two bodies, and supposed an entropic universe that would have wound down like clockwork if not periodically re-wound. Newton also wrote of an electric spirit, and of a mysterious medium he called the ether. What the basis of these is in alchemy is not clear.

Then there is the story of Newton's invention of the calculus. In reality, Newton never in his entire life described a calculus. He never had one. What he cooked up was a theory of so-called fluxions and infinite series. This was not a calculus and quickly sank into oblivion when it was published nine years after Newton's death. By 1710, European scientists had been working with Leibniz's calculus for several decades. It was about that time that Newton and the British Royal Society launched their campaign to claim that Newton had actually invented the calculus in 1671, although for some strange reason he had never said anything about it in public print during a period of 30 years. This was supplemented by a second allegation, that Leibniz was a plagiarist who had copied his calculus from Newton after some conversations and letters exchanged between the two during the 1670s. These slanders against Leibniz were written up by Newton and put forward in 1715 as the official verdict of the British Royal Society. The same line was churned out by scurrilous hack writers directed by Newton. But scientists in continental Europe, and especially the decisive French Academy of Sciences, were not at all convinced by Newton's case. Newton's reputation on the continent was at best modest, and certainly not exalted. There was resistance against Newton in England, with a hard core of 20-25% of anti-Newton feeling within the Royal Society itself. How then did the current myth of Newton the scientist originate?

-- How the Dead Souls of Venice Corrupted Science, by Webster Griffin Tarpley


The yogi who meditates on God tries to still his thoughts and eliminate them altogether from his mind. Such efforts bear fruit for those yogis who sit in meditation for 20 to 25 years. Their minds fall silent and become devoid of thought. If universal silence settles in them permanently, they earn the name of Muni. The sage Vyasa was such a great Muni. The power of such silence is incalculable. The sage Durvasa gave a boon to Sri Krishna that nobody could harm him physically in the body. Such is the power of silence that it enables a Muni to grant a boon to an Avatar.

When yoga goes to the next higher stage, the thoughts that come in the yogi's mind come in the form of images. Then he becomes the Rishi. He acquires the power of mental vision. It helps him see things that happen at a distance. When he is able to see what happened in the past and what will happen in the future, he becomes the Rishi with Jnana drishti.

At the next stage, the tapasvi enters into direct relation with the divine light. Without the help of either thought or vision, the divine light is able to reach the tapasvi's mind. Those who hear him speak from such a stage feel he has attained illumination. He then becomes the Yogi. The word yoga means union. The state of union with God is called yoga. It is of different kinds.

Those are called Jnana Yoga, Raja Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga, Hatha Yoga and Tantra Yoga, etc. The goal of yoga is to become free of the cycle of birth and death and attain union with God. The soul that is afflicted with birth, death, sorrow, falsehood, disease and ignorance wants to escape from them. What gives the liberation to the aspiring soul is yoga sadhana.

The mind, heart and body are parts of the being. Each is capable of becoming the gate of liberation for the soul. Before that, it has to become purified and lose its ego. Then sadhana can make it the door of liberation.

The Jnani makes thought the key to open the mental door. He purifies it and turns it into light. When his mind comes under the influence of the soul, it takes on the shine of the soul. Those people who persist in such a state have their mental doors opened and attain liberation.

The bhakta seeks the Psychic being that is in the cave behind the heart centre. If devotion is to ripen, then the devotee must become free of attachment. He must detach himself from the wife, children, house and possessions. Purified feelings form the basis of devotion. When the bhakta sits in meditation wishing to be one with God, such devotion opens the emotional doors and gives the soul the release from birth.


The Hatha Yogi seeks moksha with the help of the body. He purifies the body through asanas and acquires an amazing power. The body takes on a shine. He can even stop the heart for some time. Through pranayama he releases the Kundalini shakti lying coiled up in the physical centre at the bottom of the spine. He raises it gradually and finally makes it go out through the mental centre at the top of the head called the "thousand-petalled lotus". It goes out and merges with God, giving him the liberation he wanted.

The aim of all these yogas is to give liberation to the soul afflicted with the bonds of death and birth. The mind, heart or the body becomes an instrument for this task.

The purpose for which God has made this world and made millions of souls take birth is to attain the Truth while remaining in the physical realm. The soul should take on a body, be in life, and realise and manifest the light of the Supreme. That is the first and primary ideal of the Supreme. That is why great souls like the Buddha and Vivekananda have chosen to remain in the world in a subtle form and help in the liberation of each and every human being on earth. Sri Aurobindo says, "The soul seeking liberation is contrary to the ideal of the Supreme. What is fitting is for the soul to remain in the world and help manifest the Godhead."

Jnana yoga makes the mind luminous, but the Jnani ignores his body as something perishable. There are jnanis who even ridicule men of devotion. Therefore, the feelings and the physical body of the jnani do not get the purity that the mind enjoys. Even if the jnani with mental realisation wants to stay in the world, the imperfection of the rest of the personality will not allow the soul to stay on. For that, each and every part of the being must become perfect.

What applies to the jnani applies equally to the devotee and the hatha yogi.

Sri Aurobindo calls his yoga Purna Yoga or Integral Yoga. For this yoga, the method of using a single part of the being is not sufficient. The soul that encompasses all the parts of the being should itself become the tool of the sadhana.

In Purna Yoga, the soul does not seek liberation. The first task is to purify the mind, heart and body. The mind mistakes its own ignorance to be knowledge and feels satisfied. It gets released from that delusion and attains true knowledge and light. The heart frees itself from its attachments and has union with God as its only aim. One does not neglect the body as perishable and false. One takes an effort to make it luminous. In brief, what the Jnana yoga, Bhakti yoga and Hatha yoga seek as their goals becomes the basis for Purna Yoga.

As parts of the being are ruled by emotions such as love and hate, the soul itself is stained by the ego. Only when the ego gets fully dissolved does the soul become totally pure. For that pure soul, the illumined mind, heart and body open their gates of liberation. Such a soul is in a position to attain liberation.

However, in Purna yoga, liberation not being the goal, the soul does not choose to be liberated. With the body purified, the soul is in a position to stay on and help in the manifestation of the divine.

The Supreme is not satisfied with the realisation of a single integral yogi. The Supreme's purpose must be realised in each and every human being.

The man who is identified with his body regards others only as physical beings. The man who admires the mind notices only the intelligence of others. But the Purna Yogi does not consider either the body or the mind of others as important. Being a realised soul, he is able to see the soul of others. He sees every other man as another soul. It is not a mere mental knowledge for him, but is true in his very feelings. Therefore, he is able to communicate with others at a soul level. When Sri Krishna sat in meditation on the Govardhana hill, he saw that he contained the whole world in himself. What Krishna showed to Arjuna in his Vishvarupa was the same thing. That is the result of Integral Yoga, too.

The soul of the integral yogi strengthens its relationship with its origin when it meets the divine consciousness. Since it is already in touch with the millions of living beings in the world, it is able to be a good instrument of the divine.

The integral yogi does not aspire for liberation for his soul. He only tries to liberate the parts of his being from falsehood. He turns himself into an instrument of Truth and works for the salvation of the rest of creation from falsehood too. He works so that Truth may descend and reign on earth. This in essence is the "Integral Yoga" of Sri Aurobindo.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:41 am

42. MOTHER'S NAME, REPETITION OF MOTHER'S NAME AND CALLING HER

Mother's name as word and sound is very powerful. Repetition of Her name is known to relieve devotees of their problems, answer their prayers, and even evoke a personal response from Her. Repetition can be verbal, mental or taken to the heart centre, each being more powerful than the previous one. When the repetition by the devotee turns into self-repetition by something inside, the power begins to spread all over the being. Sometimes it is felt spreading all over the nerves and the body. As long as the devotee takes an effort to repeat, the power generated is enough to relieve a problem or answer a prayer in mind. The moment the repetition is taken over by the thing inside, problem-solving and prayer-answering become a small part. A greater spiritual energy is generated, and it begins to fill the being. This is a conducive state for one to strengthen his concentration or aspiration or any other spiritual faculty.

The same can be done somewhat differently too, if one is so inclined. One can start concentrating on oneself and keep pushing the centre of concentration deeper and deeper as far as it can go. It may stop at any one centre like the mental, vital, etc. It may begin to deepen its hold in the centre where it has stopped. At any given moment, each man has a deepest possible concentration and that has a corresponding centre. It is possible for one to reach there. When the repetition is made from there, it turns into a CALL. One can see the whole being responds to the call with a gentle inner movement. Mother, too, can be felt entering the being and filling the whole being with force and joy. This can be kept up for hours or days. Normally after about a week's intense calling, one will be able to see that he is in a different world. If he is one who is beset with a host of insoluble problems, he will find all of them giving way. If he is one who has no known life problems, all his psychological deficiencies will open to the force and lend themselves to dissolution. From that time onwards, it is only a matter of time for them to disappear. If he is one not endowed with such deficiencies too, he can find or even actually feel that his parts of being are filled with new forces, new capacities and talents being shaped. At a very high level of perfection in one's consciousness, such a call gives birth to god-like powers in one's being. It is then we say that such and such a god is born in someone.

By Mother's name, we mean "MOTHER", the word mother itself. It carries mantric power.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Life and Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Postby admin » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:42 am

Glossary of italicized terms

adiparashakti – the original divine female principle, the Divine Mother.
Advaitic -- monistic
agarbathi -- incense
Agastya -- a Vedic sage
akanda mounam – wide Silence
Ananda -- bliss
ananda loka – the world of bliss
anushtanam -- rituals
Anusuya – wife of a Rishi
archana – shlokas recited in worship
Arjuna – the hero of the Gita, one of the five Pandava brothers
asanas – physical poses as part of yoga
asuras -- titans
avatara – God descended as a human being
Bhagavad Gita -- The sacred Indian scripture recited as part of the battle of Mahabharata
Bhagavan -- God
bhakta -- devotee
bhakti yoga -- yoga of devotion
Brahma – God who created the universe
brahmachari -- celibate unmarried spiritual disciple
brahmanda jyothi – infinite light
casurina – an Indian tree used as fuel
chakras -- subtle centres in the body
Chettiar -- the third caste in India
chit loka -- the world of consciousness
crore – ten millions
dakshina – token offering
darshan – audience that God grants, literally meaning ‘seeing God’
darshans -- the four important days in the Ashram when Sri Aurobindo saw devotees
Deepavali – festival of light
Devaki – mother of Lord Krishna
Devi – female god
Divya Prabhandam – a devotional hymn of an Indian sect
drishti -- seeing
Durga – Kali, an Indian goddess
Durvasa -- a Rishi
Ganesh – son of Lord Shiva, a member of the Indian trinity
Gayatri mantra – mantra that worships the sun god
Govardhana – a hill
hatha yoga – a form of yoga where asanas are prominent
Indra -- a God
janma – a period of one birth
japa – repetition of a mantra
jnana drishti – vision of knowledge
jnanalaya -- temple of knowledge
jutkaman – driver of a horse carriage
jutkawalla – driver of a horse carriage (another term)
jyothi – flame
karma -- a person’s actions in one life determining fate in the next
karma yoga – yoga that sacrifices, that makes an offering of life actions
karma yogi – one who does karma yoga
karnam – village revenue official
Krishna – Lord Krishna
kundalini shakti – spiritual power in the subtle centre at the lower end of the spine
lakh – hundred thousand (100,000)
Lakshmi – a goddess of beauty of wealth
Madhvachariyar – a south Indian rishi, founder of a sect
Mahakali – Great Kali (* one of the four aspects of the Divine Mother)
Mahalaxmi – Great Lakshmi (*)
Mahasamadhi – state of body of rishi when he voluntarily withdraws from the body
Mahasaraswati – Great Saraswati (*)
Maheswari -- Great Ishwari (*)
mandapam -- hall
mirasdar -- landowner
moksha – realisation of God
mukti – another term for moksha meaning fulfillment
muni – one who has attained silence
Munsif – village official
naga -- serpent
nakshatrathirtam -- star
Narada -- a god interested in creating quarrels
Narayana – Lord Krishna
nishkamya – without desire
nishkamya karma – work done without desire
paan – betal leaf
Pillaiyar -- Ganesh
poorva janma punya – virtues of the last birth
pradakshina -- perambulation
pranams – prostrating before the guru or elders
pranayanam – breathing exercise
prasad -- blessing
PUC – pre-University class
puja – religious ceremony, worship
punya – virtue
Puranas – ancient scriptures of India’s early history
purna -- total
Purushas – gods; being of god; male aspect of Shakti
rahasyam -- secret
rahukalam – inauspicious hour
raja yoga – King of Yogas
rishi -- saint
Rishyasringar – a saint mentioned in the Puranas; wherever he went, it rained
Rudra – Another term for Shiva
sadhaks – disciples of yoga
sadhana -- yoga
Saivism – religion worshipping Shiva
Saivite – follower of Saivism
samadhi – trance; tomb
samipa -- near
sanyasi -- one who has renounced life
Saraswati – goddess of learning
sat loka – world of existence
Satchidananada -- Existence-Consciousness-Bliss
Shakti – female aspect of Purusha
Shankara – an Indian saint of the 9th century who won India back to Hinduism from Buddhism
Shiva – a member of the Indian trinity
siddhi -- realisation
SSLC – Secondary School Leaving Certificate
swabhava -- nature
swar -- paradise
taluq – a division of a district
tamas -- inertia
tantra yoga – a form of yoga that worships the Divine Mother
tantric – follower of Tantra yoga
tapas -- austerity
tapasvi -- one who practices tapas
tapasya -- tapas, austerity
tahsildar – a revenue official
tejas – glow of light on the face or skin
Tirumurthis – Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva
uttara yogi – yogi from the North
vijnana loka – Surpamental world
Vinayagar -- Ganesh or Pillaiyar
Vishnu – one of the Trimurthis
Vishvarupa – God revealing his universal form
Vyasa – a Vedic sage
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Previous

Return to Ancien Regime

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 19 guests