October
16th – Reading from AIM:
Read 3 passages from pages 5 to 7 from – All
India Magazine, October 2015 - Tantra (The Worship of Shaki).
The passages give us the knowledge of the
“The Philosophy and Principle behind Tantra”.
Tantra differentiates itself from Vedic methods. Veda deals with
Knowledge, whereas Tantra worships Prakrithi, the Will in Power. Tantra has two paths- Vama Marga (Left -hand
path) and Dakshina Marga,(Right-hand path). It is distinction between the way
of Ananda and the way of Knowledge. Tantric Yoga lost its principle in
machinery and became a thing of formulae and occult mechanism, still powerful
when rightly used but fallen from the clarity of their original intention.
October 23rd – Talk
by Anju di (Dr Anju Khanna) from Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi Branch:
Dr Anju talked about her role as the care taker of Madhuban Ramgarh -
the ashram’s mountain centre.
October
30th – Savitri, An Unending Journey:
We
continued our journey of Savitri, meditating on the pictures 1to10, from Book
One, Canto Five. The Yoga of the King: The Yoga
of the Spirit’s Freedom and Greatness.
Knowledge is of
different kinds on this Earth. No one can have the full knowledge of different
kinds. It is only partial. The knowledge that Aswapathy received, however,
was of a different kind: it was a whole knowledge of the origin, the process
and the purpose of this world-movement which, till then, no mortal had known.
Aswapathy was admitted into the arcana of the manifestation of the Infinite in
the Finite, of the Eternal in Time.
Aswapathy had crossed the barrier of thought process
to reach any knowledge. All thought obscures the object of which knowledge is sought.
Even the most brilliant action of the thought-mind acts as a veil and bars the
direct, entire vision of the object as it is. This curtain of outer mental
thought has to be parted to gain access to the inner seat of revelation.
Aswapathy crossed that barrier. All
movement in the Cosmos is a transaction between Nature and Soul, Prakriti and
Purusha. Aswapathy could read this
obscure scroll, which is completely illegible to the human eye, because he was
in a state of illumination. The light of the Spirit-memory which shone around
him lit up not only the contents of the main page but also the helpful hints
that had been recorded alongside to help decipher the writing. What he saw inspired Aswapathy with great
hope; a Will took possession of him to try and actualise on earth the higher
realities glimpsed in the region of Light. And in order to study that pattern
at a closer range he concentrated his consciousness and directed his inner
sight to those spiritual altitudes beyond the normal physical grasp. The hopes
and disappointments that are common to the normal life on earth could not touch
Aswapathy. He neither participated in those joys nor suffered those pains. He
was stationed in the poise of the witness self that regards everything but is
involved in nothing, His thoughts were no more confined to earthly interests;
they ranged immensely wider and higher, purer and more concentrated in their
aspirations for the summits of the Spirit.
There was also an uplifting augmentation of power. A force, hitherto
unknown to his human body, flowed into him. It did not spend itself out leaving
him exhausted; streaming in it was a delight that was unceasing. Aswapathy felt
overpowered by this downpour of an ineffable joy.
Source:
Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo.
November 6th – Reading from AIM Magazine:
Read
from October 2016 - Meditations on Love, Passages Divine Love and Petals of
Love.
The
Mother has given the pomegranate flower the spiritual significance - Divine
Love. Of all the powers that have into creation, the most powerful is Love. It
is a powerful lever that moves things. It is beyond existence and non-existence,
personal and impersonal. A story goes
that in Arabia long, long ago a wounded divine being wounded by the persecutors
took refuge under a pomegranate bush. The drops of blood soaked in the soil,
fertilised the tree and brought out marvellous scarlet red flowers crowded with
petals. Hence it got its significance
Divine Love. Mother used to distribute this flower of “Divine Love” on Kali
puja day to devotees, Kali being the most loving aspect of all the aspects of
Mahashakthi.
November 13th - Reading from Questions and
Answers 1956, The Mother:
We read the passages, Birth: entry
of the soul into the body and Formation of the supramental world. Mother says “You are brought here by force,
the environment is imposed on you by force, the laws of atavism of the milieu
by force.....” As a result of this the
soul has no choice but to incarnate in the physical parents and go through the
rigours to find the true path and discover it fully! Whether parents can ask for the soul they
want? Though it is rare, it is possible,
with special concentration, and meditation and aspiration. In some old
countries and even now the woman who is going to give birth to a child is
placed in special conditions of beauty, harmony, peace and well-being to get a
soul, exceptional in being to incarnate
in her womb. In the second passage, Formation of the supramental world, Mother
quotes from the Book on Vedas, “The supramental world has to be formed or
created in us by the Divine will as the result of a constant expansion and
self-perfecting.” Right now our
consciousness is cluttered with junks of ordinary thoughts and acts, so with
constant aspiration for something better, for a vaster consciousness, a truer
truth and a more universal goodness will trickle in us the supramental
consciousness with the Divine will!
-
Jayalakshmi
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