O Soul, My Soul! by Indra Sen

O Soul, My Soul!

3 essays written by Dr. Indra Sen:

O Soul, My Soul! – An essay on the goals of education as The Mother and Sri Aurobindo defined them. Dr Indra Sen also reflects on the Ashram School students answers to the question ‘What does your soul look like?’.

Finding The Soul – Finding the soul is all the issue of life. One must be first what one really is. One must get right oneself first.

The Yogic Approach To Life – The yogic approach to life beginning as a little deeper poise of consciousness can, if pursued long enough, lead to such a marvellous realisation — a realisation of a Conscious Soul in a Conscious Universe, living as a master and a king, over the lesser manifestations of matter, life and mind.

Book Details

Author: Indra Sen
Print Length: 20
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Mobi
Language: English
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走进黎明之城 – The Spirit of Auroville

走进黎明之城

The Spirit of Auroville

你说黎明之城是一个梦想。是的，它是“神”的一个“梦想”。通常这些“梦想”都会成真，比人类所谓的现实更加真实得多！

本书内容选自室利·阿罗频多和母亲的作品。您可以在参观“走进黎明之城图文展”时对应展板底部标注的序号阅读这些文字。展览所在地：黎明之城访客中心咨询处旁。

如果您想要更全面深入地认识黎明之城，阅读室利·阿罗频多和母亲的简介与作品，请看本书最后一页的参考资料。

英文内容和图片、小标题、排版：Olivier Barot

中文翻译：清宁 校对：倪慧

You say that Auroville is a dream. Yes, it is a “dream” of the Lord and generally, these “dreams” turn out to be true, much more true than the human so-called realities!

Texts in this book are selected from the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. You can read the book while visiting the exhibition “The Spirit of Auroville” by following the serial numbers marked at the bottom of the exhibition panels. Exhibition Venue: Auroville Visitor’s Centre, next to the Information office.

Book Details

Author: the Mother

English text and picture selection: Olivier Barot

Chinese translation: Anandi Zhang

Proofreading: Ni Hui

Print Length: 64 pages

Book format: PDF

Language: English & Chinese

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On Chinese Wisdom

On Chinese Wisdom

This compilation is inspired by and offered to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother who guide us by their Presence and example. It serves as a reference material for people who find it useful to learn and apply the wisdom in life. This is an age where each individual has a unique role to play, and each culture has an opportunity to radiate its full potential, beauty and fragrance in the world garden. May each one blossom like a flower, each in its own time, own way. May humanity aspire for and realise Unity in Diversity by unending education, constant progress and a youth that never ages.

Book Details

Author: Sri Aurobindo, the Mother

Compiler: Anandi Zhang

Print Length: 48 pages

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English Read more

A Pilgrimage to Sri Aurobindo by Amrita

A Pilgrimage to Sri Aurobindo

This book is a translation of a memoir written in Tamil by K. Amrita, an early disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Amrita recounts the story of his childhood and student life, but always his central concern is his relationship with Sri Aurobindo and his efforts to come closer to him. Amrita’s tale told with honesty and ardor, has all the poignancy of a sensitive young Tamil Brahmin discovering a new way of life.

The Tamil text of the memoir was translated into English soon after it was written, and this translation (titled Old Long Since) was published in 1969 and 1995 as part of larger works. It is now being published for the first time (2015) as an independent book and has been given a new title, A Pilgrimage to Sri Aurobindo. Further details are given in the Note on the Text at the end of the book.

Book Details

Author: Amrita

Print Length: 63 pages

Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English Read more

Guidance from Sri Aurobindo by Nagin Doshi

Guidance from Sri Aurobindo

Letters to a young disciple

In this series of selected letters we have Sri Aurobindo’s guidance to a boy in his late teens. The letters, no less illuminating for all their simplicity, cover a fairly large number of subjects. As their recipient grew up more and more, the subjects naturally increased in significance. The correspondence with Sri Aurobindo ran up to 1937.

A brief personal background to the correspondence:

“I came to Pondicherry in 1931 when I was about fourteen years old. In those days the Mother did not admit youngsters into the Ashram. It was only out of her kindness that she made an exception in the case of four children: Bala, Romen, Shanti and myself. We did not have a school here at that time, nor were there regular study classes. Before coming, my mind was occupied with only two things — study and cricket: they were my life and my world. I had almost decided to go to Europe and become a big doctor. I first visited the Ashram during my school vacation just for the sake of making a nice long journey, certainly not for taking up Yoga. I stayed for a month and returned in time for the reopening of my school. During that stay, what the Mother did within my being I could hardly fathom. But the result was that I returned home to stay for only two days, I hurried back here with the full realisation that I could not possibly live, either happily or unhappily, without the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Till 1933 I did not know what this strange thing called Yoga was. Hence the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were to me just like my own human mother and father. When the correspondence with Sri Aurobindo started, he had to teach me everything, not only what was meant by Yoga but also what culture, religion, philosophy and morality were. He used to correct my English, too, for quite a long time. Whatever I have gained in any way is a growth from the seeds he and the Mother sowed in me during those boyhood days.” – Nagin Doshi

Book Details

Author: Sri Aurobindo; Nagin Doshi

Print Length: 689 pages

Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Society

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English Read more

Lotus Mountain by Rod Hemsell

Lotus Mountain

While assembling this “next” collection of poems, written during the past ten years, it was gratifying to realize that there has been a development in both the forms and the meanings that are expressed in these poems. Some of the heights that were aspired to or glimpsed in the earlier poems and under other circumstances, have actually been grasped, experienced, perhaps even adequately transmitted through these later efforts. Of course it is still “me” and my experience, my language, my energies; and everything I experience is conditioned by my particular range of exposures, my limitations, my aspirations, my receptivity or lack, and so on. But, as I have said before, these poems are the product of an effort to allow nature and consciousness to come into resonance and to express the product of their interaction through an inspired flow of words, as far as it is possible. As we have been taught by the Master, the less we impose our personal mental predispositions on the process the better the product will be. This is a method that I have practiced for 50 years, and at least I can say that I have kept the faith, and this modest product is the outcome. It is also the product of the natural environments in which I have found myself and which have often inspired me; the qualities of nature seem to sometimes  reveal themselves to me in ways that stimulate a flow of words that captures and embodies her beauty and power, her wickedness and weakness, her infinity of creativity and meaning that I find irresistible. For that I am deeply grateful, and I consider it a blessing of the Mother of all forms and meanings who has enriched my life from time to time with a particle of her Infinite Grace.

Rod Hemsell
February, 2020

Book Details

Author: Rod Hemsell
Print Length: 104
Publisher: Auro e-Books
Contributor: Edith Stadig, Krishna
Book format: Pdf
Language: English
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Poems of Devotion and Stillness by Rod Hemsell

Poems of Devotion and Stillness

In reviving these earlier poems and images of mine, composed between the age of 25 and 65, I recognize an implicit belief in the ability of poetic speech and consciousness to convey in a vivid way our inner connection with “nature” – in and around us – and to express the ‘reality’ of both nature and our experience. At best it may also express other realities that transcend both nature and experience, such as the idea that stones have eyes and ears, and our lives are influenced by celestial beings. This belief in poetry implies as well that language and consciousness are more than mere ‘representations’ of reality: they are faculties that resonate with nature and experience in a way that reveals a deeper symbolic identity or close kinship between the two poles of reality. This may be a naive belief, no doubt, but it also has its roots in the much earlier Vedic notions about language and truth. Being inspired by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, my hope is that something of the truth of those notions will be seen, heard, and felt by the reader. It is this same consciousness applied to contemporary environmental issues that has also informed the fantasy-essay on climate change, Cloning the Earth, written ten years ago but more relevant than ever and likely to be better understood, today.

And yet, while these may be universal truths of ‘poetry’ and ‘consciousness’, or at least reasonable theories, I also realize that these poems are the record of unique moments of my life and my experience. As such, they are a very personal effort to express what I have seen, felt, and understood to be their true nature and quality (swabhava). It may be said that the unstated theme is the unification of self and nature through symbolic speech. The drive to write in this way has made both self and nature more real.

Rod Hemsell
February, 2020

Book Details

Author: Rod Hemsell
Print Length: 109
Publisher: Auro e-Books
Contributor: Edith Stadig, Krishna
Book format: Pdf
Language: English
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Companion to “Hymns to the Mystic Fire” (Vol.4) by Mukund Ainapure

Companion to Hymns to the Mystic Fire

Volume IV

Companion to Hymns to the Mystic Fire is meant as an aid to the systematic study of Hymns to the Mystic Fire (Volume 16 – The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo – CWSA -, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, Pondicherry, 2013) for those interested in Sri Aurobindo’s mystical interpretation of the Veda.

It provides the original Sanskrit verses (Riks) from the Rig Veda in Devanagari (without accents), translated and cited by Sri Aurobindo in Hymns to the Mystic Fire. The compiler has provided the Padpātha (in Devanagari as well as Roman Transcription) under each verse in which all euphonic combinations (sandhi) are resolved into the original and separate words and even the components of compound words (samās) indicated; and matched each Sanskrit word in the Padpātha with the corresponding English word in the Translation using superscripts. Footnotes, Explanatory Notes, and Synopsis of every Hymn based on Sri Aurobindo’s writings are given wherever available. The Appendix lists all the ‘Epithets’ of Agni from the Volume.

In the Foreword to the first edition of Hymns to the Mystic Fire, (1946) Sri Aurobindo stated that “.…to establish on a scholastic basis the conclusions of the hypothesis (mystical interpretation) it would have been necessary to prepare an edition of the Rig-veda or of a large part of it with a word by word construing in Sanskrit and English, notes explanatory of important points in the text…..” This compilation series is a humble attempt in providing such ‘word by word construing in Sanskrit and English’ of selected verses of the Rig Veda with ‘explanatory notes’.

Sri Aurobindo has said that – Throughout the Veda it is in the hymns which celebrate this strong and brilliant deity [Agni] that we find those which are the most splendid in poetic colouring, profound in psychological suggestion and sublime in their mystic intoxication (The Secret of the Veda, Vol.15 p.390). Hope the following pages provide a glimpse of the splendid, the profound and the sublime in these mystic hymns to this brilliant deity.

Book Details

Author: Mukund Ainapure
Print Length: 248
Publisher: Mukund Ainapure
Original source:
Submitted by: Mukund Ainapure
Book format: Pdf
Language: English
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The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language by Michel Foucault

The Archaeology of Knowledge

and The Discourse on Language

Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge — are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault has excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the of “things said” and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault’s own methodological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now. Challenging, at times infuriating, it is an absolutely indispensable guide to one of the most innovative thinkers now writing.

Book Details

Author: Michel Foucault
Print Length: 240
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Submitted by: Robert
Book format: Pdf
Language: English
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Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault

Madness and Civilization

A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 – from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the “insane” and the rest of humanity.

Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the “Classical Age” (the later seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries) and the modern experience. He argues that in the Renaissance the mad were portrayed in art as possessing a kind of wisdom – a knowledge of the limits of our world – and portrayed in literature as revealing the distinction between what men are and what they pretend to be. Renaissance art and literature depicted the mad as engaged with the reasonable while representing the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy but the Renaissance also marked the beginning of an objective description of reason and unreason (as though seen from above) compared with the more intimate medieval descriptions from within society.

Book Details

Author: Michel Foucault
Print Length: 311
Publisher: Random House
Submitted by: Robert
Book format: Pdf
Language: English
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