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On Education (Collected Works of The Mother Volume 12)

On Education

Collected Works of the Mother Volume 12

This volume is a compilation of the Mother’s articles, messages, letters and conversations on education. Three dramas, written for the annual dramatic performance of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, are also included.

PART ONE. ARTICLES

The fifteen articles here were first published in the Bulletin of Physical Education (later renamed Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education) between 1949 and 1955. The Mother wrote them in French and translated a few, entirely or in part, into English; in this volume, these translations have been retained. The original translations made by others have been revised or new translations made.

PART TWO. MESSAGES, LETTERS AND CONVERSATIONS

PART THREE. DRAMAS

The Mother wrote three dramas in French for the dramatic performance held annually on December 1 by the students and teachers of the Centre of Education. Towards the Future was produced in 1949, The Great Secret in 1954 and The Ascent to Truth in 1957. Each play was issued as a booklet immediately after its performance, with the text in both French and English. For this volume, the original translations have been revised. For The Great Secret, the Mother wrote the parts of the Statesman, the Artist and the Unknown Man; the parts of the four other characters were written, in consultation with the Mother, by those who played the roles. The parts of the Writer and the Athlete were written in English. A letter to the person who portrayed the Industrialist is included as an introduction to the drama.

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Notes on the Way (Collected Works of The Mother Volume 11)

Notes on the Way

Collected Works of the Mother Volume 11

During the years 1961 to 1973 the Mother had frequent conversations with one of her disciples about the experiences she was having at the time. She called these conversations, which were in French, l’Agenda.

Selected transcripts of the tape-recorded conversations were seen, approved and occasionally revised by the Mother for publication in the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education; they appeared regularly from February 1965 to April 1973 under the titles “Notes on the Way” and “A Propos”. The English translations that accompanied the French text in the Bulletin were sometimes read out to the Mother for approval; the same translations, with minor revisions, are published in this volume, number eleven of the Collected Works of the Mother.

The following introductory note preceded the first of the “Notes on the Way” conversations:

“We begin under this title to publish some fragments of conversations with the Mother. These reflections or experiences, these observations, which are very recent, are like landmarks on the way of Transformation: they were chosen not only because they illumine the work under way — a yoga of the body of which all the processes have to be established — but because they can be a sort of indication of the endeavour that has to be made.”

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The English of Savitri Volume 11

The English of Savitri
volume 11

Like the previous volumes in the English of Savitri series, this one too is based on transcripts of classes held by the author at Savitri Bhavan, in this case from June 2013 to January 2014. The transcripts have been carefully revised and edited for conciseness and clarity, while aiming to preserve the informal atmosphere of the course. This Eleventh Volume covers Book Four, The Book of Birth and Quest, and Book Five, The Book of Love, of Sri Aurobindo’s epic, Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol. Each sentence of these cantos is examined closely, and explanations are given about vocabulary, sentence-structure and imagery. The aim is to assist understanding of the poem which the Mother has characterised as ‘the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.’

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The English of Savitri Volume 10

The English of Savitri
volume 10

Like the previous books in this series, this one too is based on transcripts of classes held by the author at Savitri Bhavan, in this case during 2012 and 2021. The transcripts have been carefully revised and edited for conciseness and clarity, while aiming to preserve the informal atmosphere of the course. This Tenth Volume covers Cantos Twelve to Fifteen of Book Two of Sri Aurobindo’s epic, Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol. Each sentence of these cantos is examined closely and explanations are given about vocabulary, sentence-structure and imagery. The aim is to assist understanding of the poem which the Mother has characterised as ‘the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.’

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The English of Savitri Volume 9

The English of Savitri
volume 9

This is the Ninth Volume of the English of Savitri series. Like the previous books in this series, this one too is based on transcripts of classes held by the author at Savitri Bhavan, in this case from March to September 2020. The transcripts have been carefully revised and edited for conciseness and clarity, while aiming to preserve the informal atmosphere of the course. This Ninth Volume covers Cantos Ten and Eleven of Book Two of Sri Aurobindo’s epic, Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol. Each sentence of these cantos is examined closely and explanations are given about vocabulary, sentence-structure and imagery. The aim is to assist understanding of the poem which the Mother has characterised as ‘the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.’

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On Thoughts and Aphorisms (Collected Works of The Mother Volume 10)

On Thoughts and Aphorisms

Collected Works of the Mother Volume 10

The Mother’s commentaries on Sri Aurobindo’s Thoughts and Aphorisms were given over the twelve-year period from 1958 to 1970. The commentaries may be divided into four periods according to date, character and form.

  1. Aphorisms 1–12 (1958). Oral replies to questions submitted beforehand in writing by the students, teachers and sadhaks of the Ashram during the Mother’s Wednesday classes at the Ashram Playground.
  2. Aphorisms 13–68 (1960–61). Replies, mostly written, a few oral, to questions written to the Mother by a young instructor of the Ashram’s physical education department.
  3. Aphorisms 69–124 (1962–66). Oral replies to a disciple. During this period the Mother digressed more and more from direct commentary on the aphorisms and used the occasions to explain the experiences she was having at the time.
  4. Aphorisms 125–541 (1969–70). Brief written replies to questions asked by the instructor mentioned above.

Sri Aurobindo wrote these aphorisms around 1913 during the early part of his stay in Pondicherry. Never revised or published during his lifetime, they were first brought out in 1958 under the three headings established by the author: Jnana (Knowledge), Karma (Works) and Bhakti (Devotion).

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Evolution and the Earthly Destiny by Nolini Kanta Gupta

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

This selection of essays, drawn from the manifold writings of Nolini Kanta Gupta, is dedicated to the youth of India, to those among her children who cherish in some part of their being an aspiration, a living flame of light that yearns towards an ever-growing perfection, a truth of being and becoming as yet vaguely surmised or only partially revealed.

Throughout the many and varied domains of the human adventure, seen here in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the future, there emerges the one eternal question and dominant theme of our seeking: man past and present, man individual and collective, but always and above all, the ultimate flowering of his life upon earth.

The essays cover five broad topics: Man and the evolution, India and her Swadharma, Education, Science and Philosophy, and Poetry and Mysticism.

Book Details

Author: Nolini Kanta Gupta
Print Length: 354 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Submitted by: Avinash Tiwari
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English Read more

The Mother: Past-Present-Future by Amal Kiran

The Mother: Past-Present-Future

A collection of articles which bear upon the Mother’s life and work, her spiritual achievements, and the event of her passing by Sethna, K.D. (Amal Kiran). These writings, which bear upon the Mother’s life and work, her spiritual achievements, and the event of her passing, convey a sense of her momentous mission for the earth and humanity. They evoke the constant touch of her presence felt by her spiritual children and “the bright surmise inspired for the future by the feeling that her great and gracious labour is endless”. Also included are records of talks with her and reminiscences.

Book Details

Author: Sethna, K.D. (Amal Kiran)

Print Length: 186 pages

Publisher: Mother India

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English Read more

Seer Poets by Nolini Kanta Gupta

Seer Poets

In this essays, Nolini Kanta Gupta presents example of poetry inspired from the inner sight.

Vision is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist. The Kavi was in the idea of the ancients the seer and revealer of truth, and though we have wandered far enough from that ideal to demand from him only the pleasure of the ear and the amusement of the aesthetic faculty, still all great poetry instinctively preserves something of that higher turn of its own aim and significance. Poetry, in fact, being Art, must attempt to make us see, and since it is to the inner senses that it has to address itself,—for the ear is its only physical gate of entry and even there its real appeal is to an inner hearing,—and since its object is to make us live within ourselves what the poet has embodied in his verse, it is an inner sight which he opens in us, and this inner sight must have been intense in him before he can awaken it in us.

Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry

The poetic genius can manifest in two ways. The one is artificial imagination, the other is divine vision or direct experience. The artificial imagination is nothing but fancy. This fancy may be superbly fascinating but that would be the restive cleverness of the fickle vital and the outward senses – the delight of thought, of the critical reason; on the other hand, the divine or direct experience illumines the thing-in-itself, the truth. This is the truth-vision of the soul, the Psychic Being. The poet who depends only on fancy may possibly be a poet but never the seer-poet who sees with the divine vision and creates. In fact, the seer-poet sees nothing save spirituality. We have shown above the difference between the spiritual and the mundane aspect of the truth. But in reality in the eyes of the seer-poet there is no such distinction at all. The divine sees the Self not only in things spiritual but also in things terrestrial. Even when the seer-poet speaks of the gross, the body, he speaks of the truth behind the gross, the truth behind the body-self. The totally material and vulgar can never be the object of fine art.

Nolini Kanta Gupta

Book Details

Complier: Nolini Kanta Gupta
Print Length: 67 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Submitted by: Avinash Tiwari
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English Read more

Tributes to Nolini Kanta Gupta – Pilgrim of the Supermind

Tributes to Nolini Kanta Gupta – Pilgrim of the Supermind

Tributes to Nolini Kanta Gupta – Pilgrim of the Supermind. Contributed articles on the life and philosophy of Nolini Kanta Gupta on the occasion of the birth centenary, 1889-1989 edited by Nirodbaran.

Nolini Kanta Gupta (13 January 1889 – 7 February 1984) was a revolutionary, linguist, scholar, critic, poet, philosopher and yogi, and the most senior of Sri Aurobindo’s disciples. He was born in Faridpur, East Bengal, to a cultured and prosperous Vaidya-Brahmin family. While in his teens, he came under the influence of Sri Aurobindo, then well-known revolutionary fighting for independence against the British. When in his fourth year at Presidency College, Calcutta, he left a promising academic career and rejected a lucrative government job to join a small revolutionary group under Sri Aurobindo. In May 1908 he was among those arrested for conspiracy in the Alipore bomb case. Acquitted a year later, after having spent a year in jail, he worked as a sub-editor for the Dharma and the Karmayogin, two of Sri Aurobindo’s Nationalist newspapers, in 1909 and 1910.

He was taught Greek, Latin, French and Italian by Sri Aurobindo himself and was among the four disciples who were with Aurobindo in 1910 at Pondicherry. When the Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded in 1926, he settled permanently in Pondicherry, serving the Mother and Sri Aurobindo as secretary of the ashram and later as one of its trustees. A prolific writer on a wide range of topics, he has about 60 books to his credit of which about 16 are in English and 44 in Bengali, as well as many articles and poems in English, Bengali and French.

Nolini Kanta Gupta died at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram on 7 February 1984.

Book Details

Editor: Nirodbaran

Print Length: 115 pages

Publisher: Sri Mira Trust, 1988

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English Read more