March 20th – Reading from “The Secret of the Veda” by Sri Aurobindo:
HYMNS OF THE
ATRIS: Foreword (page 363 to 369)
Vedo veda-vidha-vyango vedango veda-vit-kavih (quote
from Vishnusahasranama)
Lord Vishnu
Himself is “VEDA” and HE embodies the eternal wisdom.
Sri Aurobindo
has expressed his challenges in bringing out the meaning of the Veda. He says
just a literal translation of the Veda would be a falsification of their sense
and spirit. He has adopted a beautiful path in which the light of the Vedic
truth gleams out from its veil of symbol and image.
Sri Aurobindo
says that “Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritual formulae
which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems.”
The meaning of
the Vedas takes different “avatars” depending on the interpretation the Vedic
poets or scholars give.
A few examples
are given on how images of Lakshmi, Saraswati and Agni etc.... became prey to
the ingenuity of the scholar who gropes for forced meaning amid obscurities and
incongruities where the ancients bathed their souls in harmony and light.
The Foreword
ends with “The secret of the Veda, even when it has been unveiled, remains
still a secret”
I would like to
add an analogy to Veda in my experience.
The wonderful
world around me like plants, flowers and the whole life systems all are like
Vedas to me, I don’t know their origin or composition.
But I call them
the names some scientists have given them, I chant slokas in my prayer which
have come from some puranas and offer the beautiful flowers and enjoy the
sweetness of several fruits blessed by our earth, wind, sun............
Everything is a secret, which with more revelation bring “Divine Ananda.”
March 27th – Savitri, an unending
journey:
Meditation on “Savitri”
with Huta’s Visuals: Book One, The Book of Beginnings, Canto One, Canto two – The Issue - Pictures
1 to 17.
The summary of the lines in
pictures from Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo is given below:
Man is a being in ferment. A restless
energy of life courses through the body and keeps it in a state of excitement.
Passions, desires, emotions are born every moment and the nervous being is in
tension. The mind is full of uncontrolled thought-activity without a moment’s
respite. The mystic path demands a quieting of this multiple movement and a
steady gathering of all the faculties around the chosen Ideal. This condition
is usually a precursor of the advent or revelation of God. It prepares the
human to receive the Divine.
It is in the supreme moments of crises
that man often rises to undreamt of heights and shows capacities totally
unexpected. The true vital being of courage and heroism, the true mental being
of light, the true subtle-physical being of plasticity and endurance, are
governed by the soul or psychic being.
Savitri had spent twelve months in the
hermitage in the deep forests far from the life of busy humanity in her
father’s kingdom. She had lived a life of a few wants and fewer calls amidst
hills, high trees and the open skies and had grown in a unique way. For the
very solitude in which she found herself opened out her being in communion with
the Infinite. Everything in this unpolluted Nature linked her with the mightier
life pulsating underneath and above. She had absorbed all and grown in stature.
This is the true balance at which man
has to arrive: he must build up within himself a deep calm, a strength of
silence which alone can bear without disturbance or breakdown the play of
delight, the pressure of intense joy that comes in the fullness of the soul’s
growth.
All her life there was a special
Presence hovering around Savitri, nourishing her growth with heavenly strength
and bliss. She had been put to birth on earth with a special purpose of the
Divine and due care was lavished on her to ensure her progress, to guard her
from all evil attentions that are ever on the lookout for openings to strike at
the instruments or children of God.
The issue before Savitri was whether to
accept life as it was characterised by Ignorance and its sequel Death or to
fight to change its nature by eliminating the disfiguring agents. The only way
to do it was to strike at the root of Death by refusing to accept his claims
and affirming the Truth of Immortality instead. There was no ready-made way to
this end and she was faced with the prospect of having to build it step by step
across the slippery marshes of the dark god. She decided in favour of the more
difficult but momentously decisive choice.
Life in this world presents a picture in
which all seems to be determined by Fate. Fate appears to be not only the
master but in its ramifications the very stuff of existence. Looked at from
another view-point, all life appears to be but a heaving of a giant Desire on
the bosom of which man is tossed like a cork. Every sweep of desire and the
waves of desires are legions, pushes him hither and thither in his attempt to
satisfy it; his life is a restless pursuit of an unending stream of desires. He
is helpless and lives as a creature of circumstance without control, without
direction.
As long as man remains a creature, for
the most part unconscious and inert, he is nothing more than a plaything for
the cosmic forces; he is a pawn. In the measure in which he is awake and
develops this consciousness well enough to direct his own movements, he becomes
a participant in the game, throwing his weight on any side he chooses.
Savitri was not a creature helplessly
subjected to the operations of Time and Fate, at the mercy of every
circumstance and impulsion that came by. She embodied a Consciousness and a
Force that were not products of terrestrial workings but wholly independent of
them. Her exterior was only a frame, a vibrant and wakeful frame, for the
puissance that ensouled it.
The mind of man in this world is tied
firmly to the tether of its physical bases. It can take flight in the skies of
thought but always it has to return to the earth. The shadow of the primeval
Ignorance pursues it wherever it goes into action and mars its perfection and
effectivity. And life itself, organised in matter and enclosed in its
formation, cannot proceed farther than the limits set to its career. Within
that span life may spread itself, unearth secrets from the womb of Time, but
once the fixed boundary is reached, life is devoured by Death. On all fronts
the material world is a closed system.
All such effort, conscious or unconscious, in
man or nature, is aimed to produce or to find this balance. It is when this junction
takes place in the subtle domains of existence that impossible is turned into
possible.
This is precisely what Savitri did: she
made her choice in the living depths of her soul, linked it with the Divine
Will and brought it to bear upon the developing situation.
April
3rd – Reading
from AIM Magazine, March 2016: Passages from Pathways to the Future:
No longer a hope
but a certainty
Mother says that
Sri Aurobindo’s New world has already taken birth, now it is no more a hope but
a certainty, but it is up to us to put all our concentration, good will and to
realise it soon, than let many years elapse before we see visible results.
The needed
aspiration
There comes a moment when the body which
is a slave to our vital urges may no longer feel it worth it to live for the
present satisfaction and will be athirst for the Light which wants to manifest;
they cry out for it, they find an intense joy in it and are sure of the
Victory.
An ardent will for progress is Indispensable
What is indispensable is joyful
renunciation of all that hampers our forward movement and set out with the
ardent faith that future revelations and realisation are for us waiting there!
An exceptional hour
Mother says that if we could remember every second
of our life that we are at an exceptional hour, a unique time, that we have
this immense good fortune, this invaluable privilege of being present at the
birth of a new world we could easily get rid of our old ways, participate and become this NEW WORLD.
April 10th – Questions and Answers 1956, The Mother, 16 May 1956:
“In sum, it may be safely affirmed that
no solution offered can be anything but provisional until a supramental Truth
–consciousness is reached by which the appearances of things are put in their
place and their essence revealed and that in them which derives straight from
the spiritual essence. In the meanwhile our only safety is to find a guiding
law of spiritual experience – or else to liberate a light within that can lead
us on the way until that greater direct Truth - Consciousness is reached above
us or born within us. For all else that is only outward, all that is not a
spiritual sense or seeing, the construction, representations or conclusion of
the intellect, the suggestions or instigation of the Life force, the positive
necessities of physical things are sometimes half-lights, sometimes false
lights that can at best only serve for a while or serve a little and for the
rest either detain or confuse us.” Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL,
vol20, pg 128-29.
The sadhak’s question to Mother “The
necessities of physical things also? I don’t understand.
Mother explains that what Sri Aurobindo
means is that all we think as Knowledge are only diminished knowledge mixed
with ignorance. Even the physical need which we think without which the body
grows weak and dies, is only a partial truth.
The example given is difference between
the people who die of hunger without food for 8 days or so, but who do fasting
for a higher purpose become healthier and get more detached from physical
needs.
Sweet Mother, what is this “imperious
law”, this “spiritual and supramental law”?
It is the truth of each being. Sri
Aurobindo says that each one of us is endowed with a unique truth in us which
we have to realise in the universe and the place we must occupy in the world.
It is very interesting that every
glimpse of Sunday activity seems to open up a new pathway to our inner self!
- Jayalakshmi
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