We look forward to more updates in this space as the celebrations proceed.
We look forward to seeing everyone on Mother's birthday 21st February 2011 at 7pm at Sri Aurobindo Society Singapore. Here are the full details of the program and schedule
Audio visual presentation for Mother's birthday celebrations
As the celebrations for Mother's birthday approach, we are happy to share with everyone the Audio visual power point that will accompany the program.
We look forward to more updates in this space as the celebrations proceed.
We look forward to more updates in this space as the celebrations proceed.
Photos from IEP retreat on 30th January
About 17 children took part in the IEP retreat on 30th January. The workshop was themed "harmony" and the children explored the concept through the use of stories, games and activities. Various aspects of harmony - such as harmony of the body, through yoga; teamwork - through dramatization; working in silence and harmony - through group paintings, were explored.
Prayer
Self-giving is true prayer. - The MotherCommon Name: Fairy Lily
Botanical Name: Zephyranthes
Spiritual Name: Prayer
Editorial
February sees the return of joy and hope and the calm assurance of another opportunity to invoke her blessings on a very special occasion. It is now also, more than during any other months that we eagerly anticipate The Mother’s presence in our midst on this glorious day of her advent upon human soil on the 21st of February 1878. World over, in all the centres of the world, let alone in Pondicherry and Auroville, The Mother will be remembered by all her children in very special ways. The significance of this day will be realised by each in his and her own terms and if, if by chance or a happy meeting of conditions, something within us is awake and in the forefront, then we become happy recipients of a special grace.
And what does The Mother actually mean to one, in one’s raw self, in one’s life lived upon this earth, in this consciousness that is oneself? Ultimately and inevitably, this question will lead us back to our selves, about who we are or what one is and is meant for. This existential challenge drives us further into the recesses of our being.
Many texts and anecdotes of sadhaks who lived closely with the Mother in Pondicherry throw some light on what she was like in the human world, working with humans for humanity and its evolution out of the animal into man and from man to a higher being. Sri Aurobindo gives us a wholesome shape to The Mother from many angles.‘ The Mother’ and ‘Savitri’ are two significant examples of works that illustrate what The Mother stands for, who she was and continues to be. There is another text that throws light on who The Mother was in intimate ways. It is The Mother’s compilation of ‘Prayers and Meditations' addressed to the Divine. This month’s issue portrays The Mother in her inner regions during particular phases in her life.
The Mother’s Prayers and Meditation formed an important part of her sadhana during those phases. Sri K R Srinivasa Iyengar reveals in his work, “On The Mother” the importance The Mother placed on her entries, all of which addressed the Divine in some form or other. The fact that The Mother kept her entries under lock and key indicates her resolve in keeping her entries a secret between her and the Divine. She probably maintained this till Sri Aurobindo himself indicated that she should have portions of these published, which is what is now in our hands as Prayers and Meditations. The Mother measures profound heights in her entries as well as the most human problems that confronted her. In all these entries, what is striking is her absolute sincerity in progressing on the path before her, in aligning her will to the Divine’s will, to become the Divine himself. She herself indicates that when such a time came, she would stop addressing the Divine or revealing her inner movements to Him since she would become one with the Divine.
The Prayers and Meditations is a concrete record of intense aspiration, intense seeking, a one pointed resolve towards the goal, a total absorption in attaining that one realisation alone of the Divine, at all costs, a record of vistas of realisations, of jubilation of perhaps the highest order possible here on earth. Indeed, it a gift for us that offers silent lessons on what it means to seek, to be sincere, what it means to aspire and how a prayer of utmost sincerity and simplicity could be offered to The Divine; of how to speak to the Divine as one’s Father, Mother, Guide, Friend and Lover in silence.
And what does The Mother actually mean to one, in one’s raw self, in one’s life lived upon this earth, in this consciousness that is oneself? Ultimately and inevitably, this question will lead us back to our selves, about who we are or what one is and is meant for. This existential challenge drives us further into the recesses of our being.
Many texts and anecdotes of sadhaks who lived closely with the Mother in Pondicherry throw some light on what she was like in the human world, working with humans for humanity and its evolution out of the animal into man and from man to a higher being. Sri Aurobindo gives us a wholesome shape to The Mother from many angles.‘ The Mother’ and ‘Savitri’ are two significant examples of works that illustrate what The Mother stands for, who she was and continues to be. There is another text that throws light on who The Mother was in intimate ways. It is The Mother’s compilation of ‘Prayers and Meditations' addressed to the Divine. This month’s issue portrays The Mother in her inner regions during particular phases in her life.
The Mother’s Prayers and Meditation formed an important part of her sadhana during those phases. Sri K R Srinivasa Iyengar reveals in his work, “On The Mother” the importance The Mother placed on her entries, all of which addressed the Divine in some form or other. The fact that The Mother kept her entries under lock and key indicates her resolve in keeping her entries a secret between her and the Divine. She probably maintained this till Sri Aurobindo himself indicated that she should have portions of these published, which is what is now in our hands as Prayers and Meditations. The Mother measures profound heights in her entries as well as the most human problems that confronted her. In all these entries, what is striking is her absolute sincerity in progressing on the path before her, in aligning her will to the Divine’s will, to become the Divine himself. She herself indicates that when such a time came, she would stop addressing the Divine or revealing her inner movements to Him since she would become one with the Divine.
The Prayers and Meditations is a concrete record of intense aspiration, intense seeking, a one pointed resolve towards the goal, a total absorption in attaining that one realisation alone of the Divine, at all costs, a record of vistas of realisations, of jubilation of perhaps the highest order possible here on earth. Indeed, it a gift for us that offers silent lessons on what it means to seek, to be sincere, what it means to aspire and how a prayer of utmost sincerity and simplicity could be offered to The Divine; of how to speak to the Divine as one’s Father, Mother, Guide, Friend and Lover in silence.
Savitri
A shoreless sweep was lent to the mortal’s acts,
And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;
Nature and soul vied in nobility…
Leaving earth’s safety daring wings of Mind
Bore her above the trodden fields of thought
Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond
To live on eagle heights near to the Sun…
Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,
A mystic acolyte trained in Nature’s school,
Aware of the marvel of created things
She laid the secrecies of her heart’s deep muse
Upon the altar of the Wonderful;
Her hours were ritual in a timeless fane;
Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.
Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres
The word was used as a hieratic means
For the release of the imprisoned spirit
Into communion with its comrade gods.
(Savitri, Book 4, Canto 2)
And art and beauty sprang from the human depths;
Nature and soul vied in nobility…
Leaving earth’s safety daring wings of Mind
Bore her above the trodden fields of thought
Crossing the mystic seas of the Beyond
To live on eagle heights near to the Sun…
Adept of truth, initiate of bliss,
A mystic acolyte trained in Nature’s school,
Aware of the marvel of created things
She laid the secrecies of her heart’s deep muse
Upon the altar of the Wonderful;
Her hours were ritual in a timeless fane;
Her acts became gestures of sacrifice.
Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres
The word was used as a hieratic means
For the release of the imprisoned spirit
Into communion with its comrade gods.
(Savitri, Book 4, Canto 2)
An extract from The Mother’s ‘Prayers and Meditations’
Although my whole being is in theory consecrated to Thee, O Sublime Master, who art the life, the light and the love in all things, I still find it hard to carry out this consecration in detail. It has taken me several weeks to learn that the reason for this written meditation, its justification, lies in the very fact of addressing it daily to Thee. In this way I shall put into material shape each day a little of the conversation I have so often with Thee; I shall make my confession to Thee as well as it may be; not because I think I can tell Thee anything—for Thou art Thyself everything, but our artificial and exterior way of seeing and understanding is, if it may be so said, foreign to Thee, opposed to Thy nature. Still by turning towards Thee, by immersing myself in Thy light at the moment when I consider these things, little by little I shall see them more like what they really are,—until the day when, having made myself one in identity with Thee, I shall no more have anything to say to Thee, for then I shall be Thou. This is the goal that I would reach; towards this victory all my efforts will tend more and more. I aspire for the day when I can no longer say “I”, for I shall be Thou.
How many times a day, still, I act without my action being consecrated to Thee; I at once become aware of it by an indefinable uneasiness which is translated in the sensibility of my body by a pang in my heart. I then make my action objective to myself and it seems to me ridiculous, childish or blameworthy; I deplore it, for a moment I am sad, until I dive into Thee and, there losing myself with a child’s confidence, await from Thee the inspiration and strength needed to set right the error in me and around me,—two things that are one; for I have now a constant and precise perception of the universal unity determining an absolute interdependence of all actions.
- The Mother, ‘Prayers and Meditations’, November 2nd, 1912.
How many times a day, still, I act without my action being consecrated to Thee; I at once become aware of it by an indefinable uneasiness which is translated in the sensibility of my body by a pang in my heart. I then make my action objective to myself and it seems to me ridiculous, childish or blameworthy; I deplore it, for a moment I am sad, until I dive into Thee and, there losing myself with a child’s confidence, await from Thee the inspiration and strength needed to set right the error in me and around me,—two things that are one; for I have now a constant and precise perception of the universal unity determining an absolute interdependence of all actions.
- The Mother, ‘Prayers and Meditations’, November 2nd, 1912.
Approaches To The Divine - A selection from ‘On The Mother’
On the threshold of a vast inner change and development, - a revolution and transformation in terms of the Spirit, - Mirra now sought other means than group discussions, more highly sensitised and delicate means than essays in persuasion, to prepare for the imminent inner change, to accelerate the spiritual growth and development. These new engines of Mirra’s sadhana- new only in the sense that they were now more frequently and fully brought into play- were prayer and meditation. With the spiritual seeker, prayer is no vulgar mendicancy for a material gift or advantage, say, success in an election or examination, business prosperity, or even mere release from physical distress or pain. Prayer has more fundamental aims, other resplendent potencies, and the true spiritual aspirant, conscious of these far aims, mobilizes by the power of prayer these supernal forces.
Mirra had already reached an advanced stage of occult knowledge and inner development when she commenced the new spiritual adventure of regular meditation and prayer, and their faithful transcription day after day. This was an individual opening out to the Unknown, an intimate dialogue with the Divine. Every day she sat at dawn near the window of her room in No. 9, Rue du Val de Grace, with a Kashmiri shawl wrapped closely about her. After a brief session of intense mediation, she set down on paper her ruminations feelings, hopes, aspirations, anxieties, visions and experiences. Being private and a spontaneous recordation, she kept this spiritual diary scrupulously under lock and key; it was, after all, a secret between the Divine and herself.
These diary-jottings, these articulate approaches to the Infinite, these pointer-readings of Mirra’s mystical life began “several weeks” before the keynote entry on 2 November 1912, and were to continue for a few years with a more or less sustained regularity; then the entries were to become fewer and far between, and at last stop altogether in 1931. In all they were to fill five stout notebooks, but it was only afterwards that their contents were to be revealed even to Sri Aurobindo who advised the publication of a selection. This was how they appeared in 1932 in the original French as ‘Prieres et Meditations de la Mere’. By a supreme act of self-abnegation, the Mother was later to consign to the flames in a boiler in the Ashram the rest of the work, perhaps the greater part.
The selected work as published in French has been described by the French poet and mystic, Maurice Magre, as “the highest perfection in style of which French is capable of,” an opinion shared by many who are entitled to speak with authority on French writing. In 1941, English translations of 61 of the prayers were published under the title ‘Prayers and Meditations’. These are manuscripts in Sri Aurobindo’s hand of several of them. For the rest, there are manuscripts written by a disciple and extensively revised by Sri Aurobindo. A fuller edition was published in 1948. Like the French, the English version is a classic in its own right. As Rishabhchand puts it:
“These Prayers are no glistening gossamer of imaginative idealism nor an imposing fabric of theological speculation, but undeniable facts of spiritual realization, - truths seen, words heard, forms touched, at least as concretely as the objects of our senses, but all in a world or worlds of light, sealed to the sense-bound consciousness of man.”
The English renderings perhaps miss here and there the simple beauty, the radiant native force, the inevitable glow of phrasing, the compelling insinuating rhythms of the French original. But the work of translation has been very sensitively carried out, and it is the general feeling that much of the fervour, the mystic élan and the poetic flavour of the original has been retained in the English version as well. There is no doubt that the work, whether in French or in English, is a superb embodiment of the lyra mystica, and a spiritual testament for all time.
(K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, ‘On The Mother - The chronicle of A Manifestation and Ministry’, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry.)
Mirra had already reached an advanced stage of occult knowledge and inner development when she commenced the new spiritual adventure of regular meditation and prayer, and their faithful transcription day after day. This was an individual opening out to the Unknown, an intimate dialogue with the Divine. Every day she sat at dawn near the window of her room in No. 9, Rue du Val de Grace, with a Kashmiri shawl wrapped closely about her. After a brief session of intense mediation, she set down on paper her ruminations feelings, hopes, aspirations, anxieties, visions and experiences. Being private and a spontaneous recordation, she kept this spiritual diary scrupulously under lock and key; it was, after all, a secret between the Divine and herself.
These diary-jottings, these articulate approaches to the Infinite, these pointer-readings of Mirra’s mystical life began “several weeks” before the keynote entry on 2 November 1912, and were to continue for a few years with a more or less sustained regularity; then the entries were to become fewer and far between, and at last stop altogether in 1931. In all they were to fill five stout notebooks, but it was only afterwards that their contents were to be revealed even to Sri Aurobindo who advised the publication of a selection. This was how they appeared in 1932 in the original French as ‘Prieres et Meditations de la Mere’. By a supreme act of self-abnegation, the Mother was later to consign to the flames in a boiler in the Ashram the rest of the work, perhaps the greater part.
The selected work as published in French has been described by the French poet and mystic, Maurice Magre, as “the highest perfection in style of which French is capable of,” an opinion shared by many who are entitled to speak with authority on French writing. In 1941, English translations of 61 of the prayers were published under the title ‘Prayers and Meditations’. These are manuscripts in Sri Aurobindo’s hand of several of them. For the rest, there are manuscripts written by a disciple and extensively revised by Sri Aurobindo. A fuller edition was published in 1948. Like the French, the English version is a classic in its own right. As Rishabhchand puts it:
“These Prayers are no glistening gossamer of imaginative idealism nor an imposing fabric of theological speculation, but undeniable facts of spiritual realization, - truths seen, words heard, forms touched, at least as concretely as the objects of our senses, but all in a world or worlds of light, sealed to the sense-bound consciousness of man.”
The English renderings perhaps miss here and there the simple beauty, the radiant native force, the inevitable glow of phrasing, the compelling insinuating rhythms of the French original. But the work of translation has been very sensitively carried out, and it is the general feeling that much of the fervour, the mystic élan and the poetic flavour of the original has been retained in the English version as well. There is no doubt that the work, whether in French or in English, is a superb embodiment of the lyra mystica, and a spiritual testament for all time.
(K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, ‘On The Mother - The chronicle of A Manifestation and Ministry’, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry.)
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