Daily Offerings from Alokda Archives - Page 16 of 34

Songs of the Soul: October 10, 2024

Mother Divine,
Root out from us all petty egoism and selfishness that are spread out in the very stuff of our life like slippery grains hoping us to stumble or to mix in the pure wine of Thy Divine Bliss drops of bitter poison. But what defects or difficulties can stay before the inrush of Thy all-transfiguring Love that washes away all impurities and even the most sticky stains of the past. Indeed Thy Grace cleanses us so completely that not only the tendencies that forge the iron chain of karma are gone but even the consequences of the past are dissolved as if by a magic solvent. The difficulties that assail us for decades (or perhaps lives) are broken in a moment by the action of Thy Grace making one wonder how illusory is our feeling of incapacity. This illusion arises because of our sense of separateness, and it is needed if we regard ourselves as separate from Thee. For there cannot be anything limitless for one who is ‘separate’. But for one whom Thou hast adopted and has tied to Thee forever there can be no limit to what is possible. For one carried by Thee, life becomes a beautiful song of the soul, the long and difficult journey turns into a perpetual delight, the stones on the way become steps of the ascension and the thorns turn as if magically into flowers yielding their secret truth.

O Mother Divine, Thy Grace is indeed infinite and Thy Power is limitless. It is we who refuse to open due to insufficient faith, it is we who aspire for little like beggars asking for small doles before the King of kings. Or we give up soon driven by impatience of our longings that come between You and us like bars of a prison.

Open us, O Mother Divine to Thy limitless Peace and Light. Open the prison of the ego, break us free from the bars of desire. Let our flight be Thy infinity and eternity.

Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa

2024-10-10

Songs of the Soul: October 09, 2024

Mother Divine, Mother of Beauty, Light and Love, fill all the spaces within us with Thy fragrance. May all be sanctified by Thy touch. May there be nothing hidden behind covers that we yet call and hold as our own. May all we are, all we have, all we do belong to Thee alone. Make us Thy empty whole and then fill this zero with Thyself, Thy Peace, Thy Ananda, Thy Beauty, Thy Force, Thy Love. And may these and all Thy countless gifts at each moment be only and only for Thee, for Thy Work and Thy Service.

Maa, may we be released completely, not only our soul but nature from the lower network of forces. May we be moved and driven completely and in all our entirety by Thy infinite Radiance and Force. Release us from all ignorance and darkness. Free us from ourselves, O, Mother Divine. Chase away all self-will and egoism and desire from each and every corner of our being.

Maa empty our mind of all the stereotypes of Ignorance and fill it with the Light of Truth. Maa empty our heart of all attachments and narrowness and fill it with Thy sweetness and universal Love that we can share with all. May empty our life of all desires and selfishness and fill it with Thy luminous Force and Delight. Maa empty our body cells of all habits and past impressions and fill it with Thy Beauty and Harmony and Peace. Maa may all the karmic impressions be dissolved and transmuted into links of Thy golden Light.

Mother Divine, may this world be freed from the clutch of the Asura who yet holds the world in its hard iron grip. May all that opposes the world’s forward march, the enemies within and without that threaten Thy beautiful earth be destroyed and vanquished forever. Leaving behind the past may we wake up to the beautiful future and summoning faith and courage, fuelled by the fire of aspiration, supported on wings of love and devotion, held by Thy infinite Grace take a leap towards the future.

Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa

2024-10-09

Shouldn’t only enlightened people speak about yoga? Or perhaps we should read Their writings?

I agree that Sri Aurobindo is best read directly. I don’t think even an enlightened person is qualified to speak on The Life Divine which goes far beyond what is generally understood by enlightenment. The only perfect example of living the Divine Life are The Mother and Sri Aurobindo. All others, even the most enlightened would have a certain angle of vision, including your great self. In that case any lecture on Sri Aurobindo’s Works including The Life Divine should not be undertaken and people should be left to understand by their own intellect filtering it through their own mind which somewhat amounts to the same thing, an incomprehension if perfect understanding is the criteria.

However as far as I am concerned, I don’t claim to provide a perfect understanding of the subject, in fact I claim nothing at all and my efforts are much more modest. My only purpose, if any, is to be a bridge, if possible, between Sri Aurobindo’s infinity and our finiteness. Even if one person comes an inch closer to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, I will feel blessed. If anyone, yourself included, since you must be enlightened to know who is enlightened and who is not, can do a better work and provide a better understanding, it will be always welcome. Since it is not the person but the work that is important and unfortunately very few undertake this work or shall we say are given this mode of serving Them. Hence the field is full of unenlightened people who will surely make way to better instruments in times to come.

However there is one thing that made me wonder if you would enlighten. What is your criteria of enlightened or of truth and reality? How do you judge whether one is enlightened or not?

Kind regards
Alok

2024-10-09

The Real Malady of Man

The real malady of man is not outside but within him. This disease which is the source of all his errors, evil, conflicts and unease is called the “ego”. It manifests in various ways and can afflict different parts of our nature right from the body to the highest mind. Its most common underlying pathology is a ‘clinging’, an inability to ‘let go’. The result is an inability to move forward in harmony with the great universal rhythm of life. This clinging is out of fear of vastness, and a sense of security in the small. Just as men construct physical dwellings to house their bodies and then get attached and bound by it; we construct psychological houses by our thoughts, feelings, impulses, desires, etc. and get trapped and imprisoned in our own formations. This temporary shelter makes us feel secure and may be necessary in the infancy of our soul, yet must the adult soul know itself not as a child of nature but discover its own true identity. Then we no more confuse the dwelling with the householder or the robe with its wearer. The robe and the dwelling become then an instrument and means of our self-expression, a field of work and not a private property or a personal possession. If we learn to step out of the safe limits of the ego-formation, of the temporary structure created by nature, then the sun and the moon and the sky and stars, the earth and all that inhabits it become our companions and the vast becomes our natural home.

But we cling to our smallness. The result is narrowness and division and conflict and strife and meaningless conquests and absurd successes and failures. We become then pawns in a chess-board moved by cosmic forces, a plaything in the hands of Time’s lords. It is they who fight and win or loose; it is we who struggle and suffer and slay or are slain.

We cling to our littleness. The result is all kinds of phobias and grief that arise from the delusion of separateness, of the self and not-self. Groupism, partisanship, religionism, racism are all its attendant outer consequences.

We cling to people, situation, circumstances and events. The result is the stress of transient satisfactions punctuated with disappointment and frustration.

We cling to habits and patterns of living. The result is various lifestyle diseases and recurring and chronic maladies of body and mind.

We cling to our thoughts and ideas and opinions. The result is narrow-mindedness, a judgemental attitude, vanity, arrogance and ignorance. We believe we are free-thinkers but we do not realise how much we are bound by our own formations. The result is various isms and schools of thought warring and jarring with each other.

We cling to our feelings and sentiments and attachments. The result is the various emotional and social problems.

We cling to our greeds and desires and our passions. The result is temporary pleasures followed by much dissatisfactions, suffering and pain.

We cling to our hates, our jealousies and our lusts. The result is various forms of moral and psychological degradation, murderous instincts and depravity of tacte, an eventual sinking towards death.

We cling to what we presume to know and believe as true. The result is an ignorance that labours and strives but only manages to move in the same blind circle that returns back to its starting point.

We cling to our systems and techniques and methods. The result is an exclusive, one-sided formula that shuts us from the integrality of an infinite, many-sided truth.

We cling to our past and therefore grow old. We cling to our present and are therefore stuck up and unable to move. We cling to life as it is now and therefore we have to meet death and rebirth in the course of the journeying rounds of life.

We cling to our experiences and therefore get locked in the spiritual ego’s bright and brilliant shell. We cling to our path and our doings and non-doings and thereby shut the doors to an illimitable Grace.

How shall then we be free? Where shall we then find the true remedy for the malaise called ‘ego’ that source of all other diseases?

Not by the body’s self that itself clings to its habits and patterns for stability of existence.

Not by the ever-changing self of life that constantly shifts but finding no certain ground moves ever and ever in the same grooves built by the energies and patterns of its past movements.

Not by the mind that is the very source of all division and which by its nature creates and hugs the bonds it creates. It can push the limits as it must but cannot set the soul free. It can make the limits more tolerable and less rigid but still we remain bound in the small or the big box to an endless chain of determinism, cause and effect, time and space.

Only the inconceivable Truth beyond mind can set us free. To That we must turn and seek leaving behind all our neat constructions of the mind and thoughts.

Only the infinite Love and the illimitable Grace can set us free. That we must implore and invoke, Only the supreme Will can set us free. To That we must offer and surrender ourselves. For, the deepest wisdom is to know this that Truth cures, Grace cures, Love cures, supreme Will cures. And these are not separate truths but one. It is the Divine who cures.

But this cure, even when it appears instantaneous, is not a fanciful magic. He cures by setting the truth within us free. He cures by liberating us from our own mind-traps and life-grooves and body-habits and subconscient memories, – in short the fixed formations and rigid patterns that repeat themselves inflexibly and are the source of all our maladies. He cures by liberating us from the knots of the ego. But the ego-self doesn’t like it and shrinks and resists. It repels the touch of Truth, it closes its doors to Grace, it resists the action of the supreme Will, it doubts the savior hands of Love.

Therefore systems and techniques and methods multiply, therefore also hospitals and doctors and diseases multiply. Therefore do problems and half-way solutions multiply. Therefore we move endlessly in circles and grooves predetermined by the habits of the past. Therefore man struggles with the burden of his fate.

Yet there is hope. For in the wake of a new dawn there rises a great wave of consciousness like a force or a thunderbolt from God. It comes to demolish all our limits to which we cling. It comes to remove the scaffoldings of our ego and set the truth within us free from all trappings and formulas. It comes to cure us radically of all our error, imperfection, disease and distress.

Would we open to this new consciousness and give ourselves to it with joy and love? Or would we resist and revolt, doubt and distrust, hide and hold to our smallness? This is the question that each individual and group has to answer. And upon its answer hangs the balance of its destiny.

Alok Pandey

2024-10-09

A New Light

For a hundred years and more man has been made to believe by our science that he is nothing more than mere mud and mire. The biologist, the psychologist, the scientist hammered into our ignorant brains the sole gospel of matter, the omnipotent power of genes and chemistry in whose wheels man is caught helplessly as a worm trapped in a hole.

For a hundred years and more man has been made to believe by our science in the non-existence of his soul or even of his self and mind which we are told is nothing but a glandular secretion and an ephemeral passage of electrical current in the neuronal circuits of his brain.

For a hundred years and more we have been made to believe that the only way we can survive and live is by plundering nature, by exterminating all that threatens us, by creating safe comfort zones that eliminate all that can disturb our ‘happiness’ purchased by paying the heavy price of an increasing servitude of our soul.

But now the coming century that opens before us brings a newer vision and a greater hope. Not by bricks of matter and chemicals alone am I built. Not by the genes is my fate decided and won or lost. Not by the props and crutches of nature do I stand and hold my precarious existence. I am greater than destiny, stronger than my fate.

This is the new message that is whispering itself as a mantra of awakening into the human heart. This is the new light that is stealing into mind’s inner chambers. This is the power that is flooding through life’s doors and filling nature with wonder and joy and hope once again.

“I saw the mornings of the future rise,
I heard the voices of an age unborn
That comes behind us and our pallid morn,
And from the heart of an approaching light
One said to man, “Know thyself infinite,
Who shalt do mightier miracles than these,
Infinite, moving mid infinities.”
Then from our hills the ancient answer pealed,
“For Thou, O Splendour, art myself concealed,
And the grey cell contains me not, the star
I outmeasure and am older than the elements are.
Whether on earth or far beyond the sun,
I, stumbling, clouded, am the Eternal One.”
[Sri Aurobindo: Collected Poems, pp. 43]

Alok Pandey

2024-10-08

What is the significance of Bali-Sugriva fight in Ramayana?

The tale of Ramayana is based on a historical event of crucial importance in far back times when humanity was at one of the critical crossroads of evolution. There was the lineage of solar dynasty kings who were born to lead humanity towards high and noble values. But alongside with them there were two more distinct shades of the human type that had also grown in power and strength. The land of the event was Aryabhoomi where the lineage of Ikshavaku and Raghu ruled with the highest Aryan ideals on the northern side of the Gangetic planes. The mid region was occupied by forest dwellers who were physically strong and mighty, closer to the animal in physique and who wore animal skin as a disguise and a way of life, like the Vanaras and the Riksha (bear). Down south was the Asura kingdom of Ravana who was slowly expanding it northwards with the help of the Rakshasas of Dandakaranya and his lieutenants like Marich, Subahu, Tadaka etc.

Though it was a part of their design, they did not or could not penetrate the impregnable Ayodhya. Sooner or later the conflict had to happen given the growing power and menace of Ravana trying to occupy territory and destroy the hermitages of Rishis and the Aryan culture. It is in the course of testing the Vanaras, to see whether he can overpower them that he had tried to challenge Bali but only to be humiliated. Since then, Ravana had made a pact of friendship with Bali which could have been potentially a deadly alliance for the civilisational values nurtured by the noble Aryans.

Now Bali, king of the Vanara kingdom. He seemed to be moving along the lines of a brute beast where might is right as is reflected through some of his stories and dealings with his brother. Yet, as arranged in the divine dispensation of things, Sugriva and Hanuman are part of the Vanara kingdom almost challenging Bali’s ways of life. In other words, the evolution of Vanaras was at juncture wherein they could either go the Asuric way through Bali and Ravana or else go the nobler humane ways through Hanuman and Sugriva. By removing Bali, Rama secured not only Kiskindha from becoming a menace or a vassal state of Ravana and his type but also secured a better and higher evolutionary possibility for the Vanaras.

This is the gist. The rest of it is incidental which I have already explained in a talk “श्री अरविंद और मानव भविष्य | TH 499”. Bali had to go for India to be secured against the Asura and to keep the flame of dharma growing in Aryavarta. The friendship with Sugriva, the method of killing Bali whom one could not defeat in frontal combat due to his capacity to draw half the opponents’ strength into himself, yet giving him an equal match by shooting through the seven palm trees as a sign that strength for strength Bali was still no match for Lord Rama are simply the outer conditions of the Divine Play.

The core was that Bali had to be eliminated for establishing the reign of dharma in Aryavarta.

2024-10-08

Songs of the Soul: October 08, 2024

Mother Divine, Maa,
How beautiful everything becomes when our thoughts turn to Thee and Thy Presence is felt in all things. It is as if a world long dead were raised up and came alive. All becomes meaningful and joyous and full of peace. It is as if all the struggles seem justified. All that the world can give pales completely before the marvel of Thy Presence. Without Thee all is dull and insipid, a thing without substance like an unreal dream or ghostlike images. With Thee all dances with joy and is full of beauty and light.

Maa may all discover Thy Presence. May all experience the felicity that comes from turning to Thee.

May we be constantly conscious of Thy wonderful Presence and all our thoughts and feelings and actions flow from Thee. May it be Thou who lives, wills, thinks and acts in us and through us and may we be simply what You would want us to be.

Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa

2024-10-08

What is it that man needs the most?

Not heaps of scientific information that often confuses us more than enlightens. Not the knowledge that burdens us with a sense of helplessness by showing the knots that tie us but not the power that can undo it. Buried within the ashes of information and the smoldering heat of knowledge lie diamond sparks of wisdom that can truly set us free. That we need the most.

Not techniques and a multiplication of methods that only change the scope and circle of our dependency and tie us in one knot of nature while releasing from another. Hidden behind all techniques and methods is the force of an infinite truth that can liberate us from all fear and ill. That we need the most.

Not systems of medicine and governance and all their-isms through which ignorance ensnares us by its changing masks. We only exchange an unpleasant mask for a more pleasant one. Above all the systems and parties lies the all–round healing power of a greater Supernature that shines upon the summits of our being as Grace and Love. That we need the most.

Beyond, all our conceptions, beyond all our constructions of thought, science and philosophy, beyond religion and its fixed formulas, beyond the dogma and the rituals of science and the beliefs and non-beliefs of Ignorance, there is the sovereign truth of the all-powerful soul. That we need the most.

2024-10-07

How to Know if I am on the Path of This Yoga?

The sign that one is on this path is either one is drawn towards the Mother and Sri Aurobindo with or without reason, or else, one feels within oneself the calling to walk the way, urge to take up this yoga, aspiration for the Divine provided it is not driven by any personal ambition.

Even before that one may be reasonably sure that he/she is preparing to enter this path if one is attracted towards the teachings and writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Walking on the path makes one humble because the more one comes in contact with the Divine, the more one understands and realises that one is nothing, one can do nothing without the Divine Mother’s Grace.

2024-10-07