A Talk in English (video)
It is first talk of the retreat "The Dialogue with Death, and Quest for Immortality", July 2015 at SAYFNA (www.sayfna.org).satsang with Dr Alok Pandey.
At the Feet of The Mother
Sri Aurobindo accepted non-violent passive resistance as a policy, and not as a cramping and crippling principle. Violence can be employed in self-defence or for the protection of the oppressed
Sri Aurobindo reveals to us vividly the early beginnings of life, the birth or rather the evolution of sense contacts, instincts, the seemingly unconscious will to live and survive in a beautiful, enigmatic, dangerous world.
A Talk in Hindi (video)
What really is Indian culture? What we see today is a mixture of many currents and streams and forces and practices. But behind it all is the core of Indian culture burning like a flame of aspiration ever bright and high.
... the first expression of love in living beings is the desire to devour. One wants to absorb, desires to devour.
Dr Alok Pandey and Narad on Savitri (VIDEO)
"All life to harmonise by thought's control,
She with the huge imbroglio struggles still;
Ignorant of all but her own seeking mind
To save the world from Ignorance she came."
Our souls can visit in great lonely hours
Still regions of imperishable Light,
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
And calm immensities of spirit space.
The real struggle of life is not the struggle for survival or competing with other forms but rather, the struggle against the Inconscient resistance that deforms and denies. This is also the root of suffering that life experiences in bird and beast and man.
My mind has almost lost its power of memory. Can’t remember anything.
There is very often a complaint of this kind made during the course of the sadhana. I suppose that the usual action of memory is for a time suspended by the mental silence or else by the physical tamas.
Mother Dear, Mother Sweet, grant that Your closeness, Your nearness, Your presence, Your love now come as a realisation, a settled fact of consciousness as an essential element of its nature.
Dr Alok Pandey and Narad on Savitri (VIDEO)
A huge inertness is the world's defence,
Even in change is treasured changelessness;
Into inertia revolution sinks,
In a new dress the old resumes its role;
The Energy acts, the stable is its seal:
On Shiva's breast is stayed the enormous dance.
Death ends his retort mocking love and disdaining man. But Savitri replies giving a glimpse of the divinity that is working in her bosom. She shows him what Love truly is and not what it has become under Death’s dark influence.
During the Second World War families came seeking refuge at the Feet of the Divine Mother. But as is Her Way, the Divine Mother turned this challenge into a divine opportunity to initiate a new project of preparing the children for the coming Future.
video
Impassible she waits long for the sun’s gold and the azure,
The sea’s song with its slow happy refrain’s plashes of pleasure, —
As man’s soul in its depths waits the outbreaking of the light and the godhead
And the bliss that God felt when he created his image.
Sri Aurobindo was now saddled with a double responsibility — the editorship and general control of the Bande Mataram, and his work as the Principal of the National College. Both of these works entailed hard labour, but in both he achieved unexampled success.
Dr Alok Pandey and Narad on Savitri (VIDEO)
A technician admirable, a thinker crude,
A riveter of Life to habit's grooves,
Obedient to gross Matter's tyranny,
A prisoner of the moulds in which it works,
It binds itself by what itself creates.
The dark deforming power that opposes the Divine plan takes hold of the force of life in its beginnings upon earth and twists it into something dark and even ugly.