Wings of the Sea

Wings of the Sea

MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM YEAR 72-73 (2016-2017) OF A LIFE
(INCLUDING 14 SHORT ESSAYS ON ‘SAVITRI’ PUBLISHED IN THE CRESTONE EAGLE)

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In 1968 the Mother gave me a hard-bound ream of hand-made paper, bound in the Ashram Press, where I was working. I was too naive at the time to fully appreciate the gesture. But I have continued to write. A first collection of poems, written from 1968 to 1977, many of which she read, was published in 1998 and dedicated to Matrimandir. One of those poems was produced as a play in Auroville, in the early years, to which she actually sent a busload of ashramites.

I have lived in Auroville for half of the past 50 years, and written hundreds of pages of philosophy. But I have also traveled to many other wonderful places, both physically and spiritually. And it is in that simple moment of clarity when poems are written that such experiences can sometimes be captured and, hopefully, conveyed to anyone who can listen and see. This small collection, mostly written in the 50th year,is dedicated to Auroville, which continues to inspire.

Book Details

Author: Rod Hemsell
Print Length: 50
Publisher: Auro e-Books
Contributor: Krishna
Book format: Pdf, ePub, mobi (Kindle)
Language: English

Book Download

Contents

• The Goddess Savitri
• The Ready Human Being
• Sruti and Mantra
• The Yoga of Transformation
• The Liberation of the Self
• The Integral Yoga
• Things Still to be Learned
• The Grand Reversal
• The Ideal
• Ideal Mind
• The Divine Paradox
• Yoga Mantra
• Savitri and Death
• Mantra, Will, and Immortality
• How to Measure the Swirls Between the Stones
• 5 Smiles
• Harvest Moon 2016
• Om Namo Shivaya
• Solstice Moon 2016
• Matrimandir
• Artist’s Muse
• Samadhi
• Trumpets
• The Presence
• The Fullness
• Mountain Sketches
• Divine Sight
• Lake Yellowstone Blues
• urgent message
• The Little Ninja
• A Crestone Dedication
• Dzogchen
• Aeonic Waves
• Absolute Tranquility
• Wings of the Sea
• Being this rising…
• Between Two Oceans

Sample

Wings of the Sea

1. The Goddess Savitri

There is a central section of Sri Aurobindo’s mantric teaching, titled Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol, which is often mistakenly interpreted as primarily a mythological legend rather than a symbol. However, through a series of workshops presented this year at centers in Europe as well as at our center here in Crestone, Colorado, we have tried to demonstrate the truer esoteric nature of the teaching that is revealed in this important part of the book. It is the section of about 60 pages in the very middle of the 700 page tome that ostensibly deals with the meeting of Savitri and Satyavan in the forest, but which is actually an initiatory transmission of the qualities embodied by the symbolic goddess of the “New Consciousness” descending on earth, and of the truly ready human soul that is elected as a vessel of that descent.

In the cantos of Books 4 and 5, therefore, we find a description, canto by canto, of the gradual emergence of that new consciousness on earth, first in the form of an invisible universal power working through nature and art and science; then as a subtle mystical intuition experienced by many who aspire for the emergence of a more spiritual reality beyond the practical and rational mind to which we seem bound; and finally as the original Vedic luminosity and joy of revelatory inspiration named Savitri that descends into the life and mind of the ready human being, with an elaborate description of what such readiness means and requires. And it is here that we are made to hear and see the qualities of a spiritual presence that can be experienced through Yoga. For example, She is described as:

A silence in the noise of earthly things…
The very room and smile of musing space…
A godhead sculptured on a wall of thought…
This intimation of the world’s delight…
A Mind of light, a life of rhythmic force…

And in these pages we also find several examples of a pattern and technique whereby Sri Aurobindo makes the poem reflect on itself in a way that expresses its deeper meaning and purpose. He writes of it:

This word was seed of all the thing to be…
There came the gift of a revealing hour…
The word was used as a hieratic means
For the release of the imprisoned spirit…

When read in the normal way, by the eyes and the brain, one can easily miss the meaning and power of lines and phrases like these. But in a dynamic mantric reading and hearing the direct revelatory effect is of a presence and quality of experience that is exactly what is being described and transmitted by the poetry. This is the mantric quality of Savitri, which is the essence of Vedic speech known as mantra. One of the primary aims of our workshops and the activities of the center is to make such experience a familiar occurrence on the path of Integral Yoga.