Daily Offerings
The Lyric of the Love
The skilful Penman’s unseen finger wrote
His swift intuitive calligraphy;
Earth’s forms were made his divine documents,
The wisdom embodied mind could not reveal,
Inconscience chased from the world’s voiceless breast;
Transfigured were the fixed schemes of reasoning Thought.
Arousing consciousness in things inert,
He imposed upon dark atom and dumb mass
The diamond script of the Imperishable,
Inscribed on the dim heart of fallen things
A paean-song of the free Infinite
And the Name, foundation of eternity,
And traced on the awake exultant cells
In the ideographs of the Ineffable
The lyric of the love that waits through Time
And the mystic volume of the Book of Bliss
And the message of the superconscient Fire.
Then life beat pure in the corporeal frame;
The infernal Gleam died and could slay no more.
Hell split across its huge abrupt faҫade
As if a magic building were undone,
Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.
Into being’s gap scooped out as empty Space
In which she had filled the place of absent God,
There poured a wide intimate and blissful Dawn;
Healed were all things that Time’s torn heart had made
And sorrow could live no more in Nature’s breast:
Division ceased to be, for God was there.
The soul lit the conscious body with its ray,
Matter and spirit mingled and were one.
[Savitri: Book Two Canto 8]
The Beauty of Affection and Tenderness
March 6, 1914
After having suffered acutely from their suffering, I turned towards Thee, trying to heal it by infusing into it a little of that divine Love which is the source of all peace and all happiness. We must not run away from suffering, we must not love and cultivate it either, we must learn how to go deep down into it sufficiently to turn it into a lever powerful enough for us to force open the doors of the eternal consciousness and enter the serenity of Thy unchanging Oneness.
Surely this sentimental and physical attachment which causes an agonizing wrench when bodies are separated, is childish from a certain point of view, when we contemplate the impermanence of outer forms and the reality of Thy essential Oneness; but, on the other hand, is not this attachment, this personal affection, an unconscious effort in men to realise outwardly, as far as possible, that fundamental oneness towards which they always move without even being aware of it? And precisely because of that, is not the suffering that separation brings one of the most effective means of transcending this outer consciousness, of replacing this superficial attachment by the integral realisation of Thy eternal Oneness?
This is what I wished for them all; this is what I ardently willed for them, and that is why, assured of Thy victory, certain of Thy triumph, I confided their grief to Thee that by illuminating it Thou mayst heal it.
O Lord, grant that all this beauty of affection and tenderness may be transformed into glorious knowledge.
Grant that the best may emerge from everything and Thy happy Peace reign over the earth.
[Prayers and Meditations of the Mother]
Love is Universal and Eternal
Love is one of the great universal forces; it exists by itself and its movement is free and independent of the objects in which and through which it manifests. It manifests wherever it finds a possibility for manifestation, wherever there is receptivity, wherever there is some opening for it. What you call love and think of as a personal or individual thing is only your capacity to receive and manifest this universal force. But because it is universal, it is not therefore an unconscious force; it is a supremely conscious Power. Consciously it seeks for its manifestation and realisation upon earth; consciously it chooses its instruments, awakens to its vibrations those who are capable of an answer, endeavours to realise in them that which is its eternal aim, and when the instrument is not fit, drops it and turns to look for others. Men think that they have suddenly fallen in love; they see their love come and grow and then it fades—or, it may be, endures a little longer in some who are more specially fitted for its more lasting movement. But their sense in this of a personal experience all their own was an illusion. It was a wave from the everlasting sea of universal love.
Love is universal and eternal; it is always manifesting itself and always identical in its essence. And it is a Divine Force; for the distortions we see in its apparent workings belong to its instruments. Love does not manifest in human beings alone; it is everywhere. Its movement is there in plants, perhaps in the very stones; in the animals it is easy to detect its presence. All the deformations of this great and divine Power come from the obscurity and ignorance and selfishness of the limited instrument. Love, the eternal force, has no clinging, no desire, no hunger for possession, no self-regarding attachment; it is, in its pure movement, the seeking for union of the self with the Divine, a seeking absolute and regardless of all other things. Love divine gives itself and asks for nothing. What human beings have made of it, we do not need to say; they have turned it into an ugly and repulsive thing. And yet even in human beings the first contact of love does bring down something of its purer substance; they become capable for a moment of forgetting themselves, for a moment its divine touch awakens and magnifies all that is fine and beautiful. But afterwards there comes to the surface the human nature, full of its impure demands, asking for something in exchange, bartering what it gives, clamouring for its own inferior satisfactions, distorting and soiling what was divine.
[The Mother: CWM 3]
Songs of the Soul: September 30, 2024
Mother Divine, people find the sight of physical suffering distressing. But the psychological state in which most human beings dwell is much more distressing.
Instead of studying the real causes and finding a radical remedy, man launches himself into an struggle for material wealth and comforts hoping these will solve his problems. Little does he realise that he is entering into a terrible vortex from which it is even more difficult to come out. For while material wealth provides some temporary outer relief it comes at a heavy price of an inner servitude.
Very few can keep their soul alive and prevent their mind and heart from falling into a dull stupor once they enter into this dark and bottomless pit of desires that lights up the darkness by artificial lights, making it worse by thwarting our seeking for the true authentic light. Money and materialistic sciences are new gods promising a bright future for man, but they cannot deliver. By the time it becomes obvious to all, humanity may be pushed beyond the brink.
Seeing and contemplating all this miserable state of mankind a prayer rises from the heart. Save mankind, Maa, save man from himself. Save him from the route he has taken towards self-annihilation while thinking it is the high road to heaven. Save us Mother, save us from the civilisational catastrophe towards which we seem to be heading in the name of freedom and progress and happiness. Save us from ourselves.
Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa Maa
The Ways of Nature (a parable)
The white and the black ant met one day on their way to their respective hiding grounds.
Looking disdainfully at the black ant, the white one remarked, “How underdeveloped is your ant civilization. Though we are of the same stock of ants, see how we have developed.” Saying so, the white ant started bragging about its termite city that had huge high-rise mounds that looked impressive and completely shielded from the sun. They were weatherproof and the entire colony was so well organized that it was near impossible to wipe them out. The black ant had nothing to compare with, as it lived in small hideouts adapting and adjusting to the ways of nature. All that it could communicate was that outer success alone does not matter. The white ant differed saying that nature favours the aggressive and the successful. They alone survive since they are strong and capable, the fittest of the ants. The black ant was not ready to give in so easily. Taught by the ways of Nature on which they depended rather than their outer prowess alone, the black ant said:
“Look at the tiger. Strong and powerful, it has all that is needed to survive. And then look at the deer, swift footed with beautiful eyes yet an easy game for the tiger. See how Nature has worked in ways that the tiger is a threatened species whereas the deer continues to multiply.”
The white ant seemed unconvinced. As a gesture of superiority, it even invited the black ant to stay in its termite city for a few days and enjoy the coolness and comfort.
The wise black ant refused but, in the passing, remarked, “Great and successful you may be but what is the use of such a success that human homes dread your arrival whereas I am welcomed by them as a sign of good fortune. Your city is built by devouring the very wood that shelters you, whereas we enrich the soil that gives us space.”
So saying it quietly lugged along its way. The white ant wondered for a moment at the words of wisdom in their parting but soon walked its way with an air of vanity at the achievements of their kind. As it walked Nature, the great mother of all creatures, smiled and gently whispered to the soul of earth, “I have shared something of my intelligence and power with all my creatures but this I have made the rule of the game. They who live only for themselves shall perish whereas they who live with the sense of the whole shall survive and grow.”
And as she, thus, whispered these words of wisdom, the King of Lanka heard it not and continued to build his termite city with stolen wealth and the blood of earth’s creatures. But on the other end of Bharatvarsha, the gentlest, yet mightiest of all, Rama of the Ikshvaku clan smiled as if nodding to Mother Nature in assent, reassuring her that the Lord of Nature has come to uphold the law and the rule of the game. The days of the devouring Rakshasa and the Asura were numbered. But the animal kind, from the monkey to the bear would have the glory of aiding the ascent of man.
Alok Pandey
Should We Expect Kalki Avatar Coming?
Depends upon what we expect from his coming! The idea of Kalki Avatar is straight from the Vishnu Purana considered as few of the authentic puranas rich in occult significance. He is described as a lame warrior according to some texts who rides a white horse and slays the wrong doers by a sword thereby establishing a new Satya Yuga, a new era of spiritual progress. Though the predictions of a second coming are there in both Christianity and Buddhism (both were Avatars) it has been given its true divine sense by Sri Krishna in the Gita. The Gita does not dwell in the outer characteristics as much as it describes the inner work of the Avatar. He is characterised by his works which mainly consist of restoring the dharma, rescuing the doers of good, destroying the doers of evil, and finally, establishing dharma once again amongst the people. Through all these works he leads the collective march of mankind one step further towards its inevitable divine destiny. When we see in this light, then the details of Kalki’s life are clearly symbolic. To imagine that in this age of mankind someone would descend from heaven with a metal sword in hand and ride a white horse to destroy the evil doers is only to perpetuate a story whose true inner meaning will be lost and the Avatar pass by without even being noticed since we are looking at primarily outer physical things and missing the inner. The second coming is always the symbol of the Divine descending in a new form consistent with the Age and leading man according to the need of the hour, what is known as the Yuga Dharma.
When we look at the times we live in with the light that the Gita provides then we will be forced to conclude that the Avatar has come and gone back doing what he had to do. A clear look at the previous century shows us the great divide between the first and the second half. If we look at the figures around, we shall at the center of this change none else but Sri Aurobindo once again as the divine charioteer piloting humanity through the crisis of Nazism, Imperialism, Scientific Materialism, Communism which is like the distorted image of Vedantic Socialism. Among the first tasks that he undertook was to drive the British out of India. At the same time, he stood against Hitler’s Nazism and openly declared that he had put his spiritual force behind the allies seeing in the triad of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini the Asuras of the Age. India the custodian and upholder of dharma has fallen low and its mighty current of spirituality was either broken into a mass of superstitions and rituals whose meanings had been lost or else begun to dwindle after the wonderful manifestation of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. It was the moment of dense darkness which is what, dharmasya glani really means. Sri Aurobindo took up the work of restoration whose ground was prepared by the saint of Dakhineswar and the fiery patriot sage as mentioned above. Subsequently Sri Krishna himself handed over the baton of the coming Age to him in the Alipore jail. He gave a new key to the understanding of the Vedas and the Upanishads, laid down the larger lines along which India would attain freedom, stood against the Axis powers until they were defeated and destroyed, and eventually through his tremendous tapasya joined by the Mother’s Force (the white steed) he flashed the sword of Knowledge destroying darkness and opening the doors of man towards a new creation.
This is not to say that there were no other great figures during that period or there will not be other great human beings who will come thereafter. Also, it is not that everything has become wonderful and there are no more crisis for man to face and overcome. As long as humanity resists its divine destiny, he will experience the pressure and the push. But the decisive turn has been taken which becomes obvious only if we slightly enlarge our time to include the previous century and a little before that. Equally when we take a look at the great divine beings who manifested upon earth nowhere do we find this tremendous manifestation that serves at once as a divine example for humanity, reconciles the oppositions of Spirit and Matter with a synthetic spirituality, who by his Force single handedly stayed the wheels of the British Empire and reversed the fortunes of Hitler by his lone spiritual power. Nowhere do we find such a luminously powerful pen that rescued the Vedas from the shroud of obscurity as also gave the Yuga dharma and the Gospel for the New Age which he not only foresaw but for which he worked to establish firmly within the heart of man. There is in Sri Aurobindo a very clear taking up and summing up of the previous Avatars, notably Sri Krishna as well as an embodiment of the anguish of the Age. He changed this anguish into a conscious aspiration and promised a new a happier Age emerging through a change of consciousness within man leading to outside changes in his ways of life.
The Mother clearly said that ‘Sri Aurobindo is the last Avatar in a human body’ and one can simply bow down before her statement in humility and gratitude.
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