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

March - April Sunday Activities at the Centre – A glimpse

March 20thReading 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 3rdReading 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 10thQuestions 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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