Guiding Light of The Month

O Lord, how ardently do I call and implore Thy love! Grant that my aspiration may be intense enough to awaken the same aspiration everywhere: oh, may good- ness, justice and peace reign as supreme masters, may ignorant egoism be overcome, darkness be suddenly illu- minated by Thy pure Light; may the blind see, the deaf hear, may Thy law be proclaimed in every place and, in a constantly progressive union, in an ever more perfect harmony, may all, like one single being, stretch out their arms towards Thee to identify themselves with Thee and manifest Thee upon earth. - The Mother

May- June Sunday Activities at the Centre – A glimpse

May 17th and 24th - Meditation on “SAVITRI” – Book 10, Canto 1, 2 and 3:
The Dream Twilight of the Ideal, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of The Ideal, The Debate of Love and Death
We read the passages twice and shared our thoughts on them.
Given here a summary for a better understanding of the dialogue between Savitri and the God of Death.
Savitri's soul continues to wrestle with Death and to ridicule his words of Reason. Death challenges her to seek to know, for knowledge kills love. Quickly comes her response that the Nature of Love gives birth to knowledge. Drifting along with them as they move into the Land of Nought (book 10), we hear the debate continue, hear them pit all the contraries of life against each other, and we hear from Savitri the very reason of Death's existence.
Death peals forth a long proclamation of how he cancels all life's golden truths. To his dangerous music this warrior-maiden gives a picture of what her God of Love has done and will yet accomplish, and dares Death to produce a greater God to captivate her soul. Death sneeringly interprets her words as hallucinations of the mind and gives an oration on the deceptions of mind and raises Unconsciousness as the pinnacle of all.
Savitri answers in Death's own words, calling him the dark browed sophist of the universe masking divinity with his dance of death. She sings forth in glorious poetry the occult miracle of God's wonders from a tiny seed; and then again in lines of majesty power speaks of her assured triumph, of her love as stronger than his bonds of death.
The Dark King still trying to discourage her, ironically speaks of her fantasy of Truth, says that Truth is hard as stone. Back and forth sparkle the words of the debate. Death uses subtle reason and arms himself with all man's faltering searches, his limiting spiritual goals, and exaggerated and imperfect understanding of Truth to prove the futility of God's power, but Savitri, delivered of twilight thoughts, with a heart of Truth, answers his lures.


Here Savitri chants lyrics of Nature’s miracles, of the wonders of the Infinite and of the limitless powers of a soul integrally surrendered to God.
Death, suspecting her to be the Mother of the Gods embodied, challenges her to show a body of living Truth, for has matter ever been able to hold Truth? Savitri tells Death who he really is and warns him he will cease to be when he touches the embodied Truth Supreme, and then reveals her being all one with God. Death, still unconvinced, makes his last stand in support of his blind force and dares Savitri to reveal the Power of the Divine, for many have Truth, but who has the Power to radiate it?
Then is given a picture of Savitri as she becomes transformed into a divine being with all her chakras or lotuses of Power scintillating.
The most powerful speech of all follows, and Savitri exhibits her living Power of Truth and proves that death is needed no more. Death is shown gradually vanishing and finally defeated, eaten by light.                
Taken from, SAVITRI: A Summary of Sri Aurobindo's Epic Poem
[Dr. Tyberg, who prepared this summary of the poem, was the founder of the East-West Cultural Center in Los Angeles and its guiding light for years until her passing in 1980. She is the author of several articles and two books on Sanskrit, First Lessons in Sanskrit and Language of the Gods.]

May 31st - Readings from “More Vignettes of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother” by Shyam Kumari:

The book has 421 True Stories, the reminiscences of the devotees of their experiences with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. We picked up a few stories and reading them really made us feel the vibrant presence of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

June 7th - Readings from The Mother’s Works, Questions and Answers, 1955:

A circle of eight members gathered this evening for the reading of The Mother’s Question and Answers, Vol. 7, entry for 3 August 1955. We studied three questions and the answers to them, based on The Mother’s reading on, “Lights on Yoga – Surrender and Opening”. The following are the three questions:

1.      What is “the true life-activity”?
2.      Sweet Mother, here Sri Aurobindo has said “It is impossible.” Why? For You have said that nothing is impossible!
3.      Sweet Mother, here Sri Aurobindo has said: “If the inmost soul is awakened, if there is a new birth out of the mere mental, vital and physical into the psychic consciousness, then this Yoga can be done…” Why Has he said “the inmost soul”? Is there a superficial soul?

We all appreciated The Mother’s point blank answers yet so succinctly and laboriously explained to the questioning children. Pat came the answer to the first question, without any further elaborations : “It is to express the Divine”.  In answer to the second question, The Mother explains that in the larger scheme of space and time, there may be nothing that is impossible. However, given a particular point in space and time, conditions exists and nothing can happen if these given conditions are not fulfilled and as such, something may be rendered possible or impossible, accordingly. For the last question, The Mother offers that there is a difference


between experiencing the innermost or central soul or psychic being and a part of the surface being influenced by the innermost being.

For greater clarity and infinite benefit, the reader is requested to visit and contemplate on pages 258-260 of Questions and Answers, 1955, Vol. 7, published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1979, 2003.


June 14th - Readings from The Mother’s Works, Questions and Answers, 1956, on “Synthesis of Yoga”:

This evening ten of us gathered at the center to read on the Mother’s responses to questions on Sri Aurobindo’s “Synthesis of Yoga” posed to The Mother on the 11th of January 1956. The series of questions we read were:

Mother, “this craving life-force or desire-soul in us has to be accepted at first, but only in order that it may be transformed” (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 77). But even when we understand that it is a desire and must be rejected, there are difficulties in discerning if it is a desire leading us to the Divine or if it is purely desire.
The Mother: One deceives oneself only when one wants to deceive oneself. It is very, very different.
But within, one understands.
The Mother: Good. Well, then that’s enough, if one understands somewhere, that’s enough. Is that all? No questions?
Mother, on January 6 you said, “Give all you are, all you have, nothing more is asked of you but also nothing less.”
Yes.
What is meant by “all you have” and “all you are”?
The Mother’s succinct answer to this last question was: “… that each one is asked to give what he has, that is, all his possessions whatever they may be, and what he is, that is, all his potentialities — which corresponds to the consecration of one’s life and the giving of all one’s possessions — and that nothing more than this is asked. What you are, give that; what you have, give that, and your gift will be perfect; from the spiritual point of view it will be perfect. This does not depend upon the amount of wealth you have or the number of capacities in your nature; it depends upon the perfection of your gift, that is to say, on the totality of your gift.”
The Mother then recounts an ancient story about a poor woman, the visitor and the half-eaten mango. Do visit pages 14-16 of Questions and Answers, 1956, published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1984.

-          Jayalakshmi and Jayanthy

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