Daily Offerings
Our Human Knowledge
Our human knowledge is a candle burnt
On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth;
Man’s virtue, a coarse-spun ill-fitting dress,
Apparels wooden images of Good;
Passionate and blinded, bleeding, stained with mire
His energy stumbles towards a deathless Force.
An imperfection dogs our highest strength;
Portions and pale reflections are our share.
Happy the worlds that have not felt our fall,
Where Will is one with Truth and Good with Power;
Impoverished not by earth-mind’s indigence,
They keep God’s natural breath of mightiness,
His bare spontaneous swift intensities;
There is his great transparent mirror, Self,
And there his sovereign autarchy of bliss
In which immortal natures have their part,
Heirs and cosharers of divinity.
[Savitri: Book Two Canto 12]
Break These Chains
May 9, 1914
O my divine Master, my love aspires to Thee more intensely than ever; let me be Thy living Love in the world and nothing but that! May all egoism, all limitation, all darkness disappear; may my consciousness be identified with Thine so that Thou alone mayst be the will acting through this fragile and transient instrument.
O my sweet Master, how ardently my love aspires to Thee….
Grant that I may be nothing but Thy Divine Love and that in every being this Love may awake, powerful and victorious.
Let me be a vast mantle of love enveloping all the earth, entering all hearts, murmuring in every ear Thy divine message of hope and peace.
O my divine Master, how ardently I aspire for Thee! Break these chains of darkness and error; dispel this ignorance, liberate, liberate me, make me see Thy light….
Break, break these chains…. I want to understand and I want to be. That is to say, this “I” must be Thy “I” and there must be only one single “I” in the world.
O Lord, grant my prayer, my supplication rises ardently to Thee.
[Prayers and Meditations of the Mother]
Surrender of the Human Mind
If a small human mind stands in front of the Divine Universal Mind and clings to its separateness, it will remain what it is, a small bounded thing, incapable of knowing the nature of the higher reality or even of coming in contact with it. The two continue to stand apart and are, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, quite different from each other. But if the little human mind surrenders, it will be merged in the Divine Universal Mind; it will be one in quality and quantity with it; losing nothing but its own limitations and deformations, it will receive from it its vastness and luminous clearness. The small existence will change its nature; it will put on the nature of the greater truth to which it surrenders. But if it resists and fights, if it revolts against the Universal Mind, then a conflict and pressure are inevitable in which what is weak and small cannot fail to be drawn into that power and immensity. If it does not surrender, its only other possible fate is absorption and extinction. A human being, who comes into contact with the Divine Mind and surrenders, will find that his own mind begins at once to be purified of its obscurities and to share in the power and the knowledge of the Divine Universal Mind. If he stands in front, but separated, without any contact, he will remain what he is, a little drop of water in the measureless vastness. If he revolts, he will lose his mind; its powers will diminish and disappear. And what is true of the mind is true of all the other parts of the nature. It is as when you fight against one who is too strong for you—a broken head is all you gain. How can you fight something that is a million times stronger? Each time you revolt, you get a knock, and each blow takes away a portion of your strength, as when one who engages in a pugilistic encounter with a far superior rival receives blow after blow and each blow makes him weaker and weaker till he is knocked out. There is no necessity of a willed intervention, the action is automatic. Nothing else can happen if you dash yourself in revolt against the Immensity. As long as you remain in your corner and follow the course of the ordinary life, you are not touched or hurt; but once you come in contact with the Divine, there are only two ways open to you. You surrender and merge in it, and your surrender enlarges and glorifies you; or you revolt and all your possibilities are destroyed and your powers ebb away and are drawn from you into That which you oppose.
[The Mother: CWM 4]
Songs of the Soul: November 5, 2024
Mother Divine,
a strange and inexplicable peace, a subtle joy and harmony, the gentle throb of a sweet love can be easily felt wherever the human footfall is few. It is so easy to feel Thy majestic Presence wrapped in an inner Silence in the forest, in wilderness, in the desert sand dunes, in the mountains pouring their heart of love in streams rushing towards the plains, in the stars moving quietly in space. From the minute to the vast, all speaks of Thy Presence. But the coming of man, the intervention of the human mind, even when it tries to create beauty, disturbs this spontaneous harmony. Our idea of beauty is something seen or felt in isolation whereas the beauty in material nature is as if flowing into each other, merging with the backdrop as if woven with threads of a vast universal love. It is like the difference that one feels while seeing a beautiful garden or landscape built by human hands and the wild blooming of the flowers and plants with creepers and animal life and the various fragrances blending into each other. Nothing is unduly prominent, each element is as if the part of a wholeness, as if the canvas itself is beautiful with all its asymmetry and free flowing patterns. Even the best of human art is a good imitation.
And yet, man is Thy chosen vehicle who carries the burden of a high and luminous future. He is the instrument of Nature through which she hopes to climb to her own origin, the Divine Supernature. Man is the means built by nature through which she hopes to discover her Lord whose image she has sheltered in her heart. May man rise up to his real purpose and crossing the perilous bridge discover what he always carried within yet seeks outside. May our life fulfil the great purpose for which it has come into existence.
Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa
On Magic and Miracles (10) Requisites for a Miracle
We see that a miracle has two requirements, which represent two ends of a single continuum. On one is the nature of the force that performs the miracle, at the other, there is the ground and recipient on whom the miracle is performed. The force responsible for the miracle may come from the subtle physical, vital, mental, rarely the spiritual or even the very highest Divine Grace. Each brings its own stamp on the nature of the induced change. The Divine Grace works thoroughly and therefore may need more time, as it is not bound by human calculations. The other forces may sometimes seem to work instantaneously but their work is incomplete and the malady is mostly held in check rather than truly healed. It may erupt later with similar or altered appearances, necessitating repeated interventions. The ground conditions that facilitate a miracle by the intervention of the highest are faith in the Force or the one who represents it. It is further facilitated by an atmosphere of calm and peace. Detachment in the mind and nervous vital parts from the suffering is a further help. Above all, an absence of fear and anxiety about the illness and its possible complications immensely helps the process. Of course, most miracles need some kind of call from the subject, but this call should not be confused with anxiety. It may be intense and full of a luminous trust in the Divine. Luminous in the sense that one should be full of confidence that the Divine is there, looking after our bodily existence and even if it seems apparently painful and even if we do not understand it now, it is for the best in the highest sense.
Of course the materialist might always object that all this talk of unseen forces is simply an imagination. To him, all such instances of unexpected recovery are due to chance (a scientifically approved term that conceals ignorance of the forces and factors involved). Or else he points to nothing more than cases of spontaneous recovery that have run their natural course. There is, of course, some truth in the latter logic since many illnesses indeed seem to recover without any intervention, if we only allow sufficient time. But the time taken in spontaneous recovery is precisely due to this play of forces behind the scene. There is no other miracle but a conscious handling and use of these concealed forces. After all, the material scientist is simply stating a fact that illnesses do spontaneously recover and there can be no objection since this is a well-known truth. Indeed some so-called miracle makers credit themselves with this type of recovery. But these facts do not discredit the play of deeper forces. The materialist does not understand or has an a priori bias against them. He is unable to explain the phenomenon or reproduce it, though he sometimes does try to explain it away. That is to say, he plays with words that sound high and scientifically authentic, but where there is equally no evidence. The charlatan, on the other hand, simply makes a false claim of having a hold over these forces whilst he has none. The matter cannot be proved or disproved on the physical plane. It is like small children trying to guess what propels an engine or lights a bulb. So long as the process is unknown it appears a miracle; when it is known and understood, it is simply natural. So too, in the deepest sense, there is no miracle but only a play of Nature, or indeed, Supernature. Once we have understood and known its process it becomes natural to us, though it may still seem miraculous to the one who has not yet ventured into that territory. Just as children stop regarding commonplace events as magical or miraculous when they grow up and learn the process of things, so too we must grow out of our infancy and play with energies and learn about other forces in God’s world of infinite wonders. Then the scientist and the occultist shall speak with one voice. Then the miracle shall cease to be. Or perhaps the whole of life and its most seemingly insignificant events will appear as a wonder and miracle!
Alok Pandey
What is the difference between the Samadhi of Pondicherry and Sacred Relics at Centres outside Pondicherry?
The importance of sacred Relics of Divine beings and personalities has always been known. Touch is intimately connected to the earth and objects invariably carry the impression (and the vibration) of the person who has used them. It was this truth that was at the basis of many practices in India. The difference between these and the sacred Relics (hair, tooth and nails) is that while the objects used by a divine being carry the stamp because they have been touched or used physically (it is a contact through the body) whereas in the latter it is the body itself carrying the unforgettable stamp of the consciousness of the divine being directly upon the body itself. With Sri Aurobindo it becomes even more special since unlike other Yogis, Sri Aurobindo specifically worked to transform the body by infusing the supramental consciousness into it. This is a singular example in the spiritual history of mankind. Therefore its immense importance cannot be compared to other sacred Relics.
As to the Ashram, it is and will always remain very special because it is not just Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s physical body lying in the Samadhi but even more importantly their taposthali (seat of tapasya) where everything, from their rooms, the walls and floors and the soil and the very air contains something of them soaked in it very tangibly..
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