On Thoughts and Aphorisms (CWM Vol.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
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Language: English Read more

The End of Certainty by Alexis Karpouzos

The End of Certainty

We live in a universe that can be seen and experienced from many different perspectives. We therefore need to look at the universe from many different angles. Everything and everyone is a form of the universe being expressed in a particular way. In other words, each one of us can say with absolute certainly “We are the Universe!” Since we are the universe, each one of us provides a valuable perspective that complements the contributions of everyone and everything else around us. Each of us is the universe being expressed in a particular location in a specific way. We’re all part of the same moving and evolving cosmos, but the view of it is unique from each of our respective locations. This suggests that the universe is not only omnicentric, but that it is also multiperspectival – there are many different, and equally valid, viewpoints on this. Each one of us is a cosmic laboratory within which we can discover the secrets of the universe.We speak in various ways, we are each the universe having become aware of itself in our own unique way.

The insights that the universe has many different perspectives and is both cosmic and personal has great transformative potential, and is worth reflecting on deeply. Creativity and Modern Science Creativity and Theory of relativity In Einstein’s theory of relativity, the notions of events (space and time simultaneity), mass and energy equivalence (special relativity), space expansion (big bang) as well as space and energy-mass equivalence, are introduced. General theory of relativity combined to quantum mechanics leads to the emergence of the whole universe from zero and absolute nothingness. Such “emergence-creation” of the universe from zero does not take place in space or time, since both are identical to the universe, space as energy expansion of the vacant space and time as a measurement unit of movement and change. Hence, the event, as “something” that takes place, and since it takes place, creates space, time and matter-mass-energy, constitutes a novelty.

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Author: Alexis Karpouzos
Print Length: 58
Original source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333617946_Alexis_karpouzosThe_End_Of_Certainty
Submitted by: Jenny Lavoro
Book format: Pdf
Language: English
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Sri Aurobindo’s Humour by Nirodbaran

Sri Aurobindo’s Humour

This book represents a new and, to the general public, quite an unfamiliar aspect of Sri Aurobindo — his humour. There is a common belief that yogis and saints are grave and reserved by nature. They have no sense of humour. Sri Ramakrishna was probably the first among them who is known to have shattered this false notion. Sri Aurobindo was revered and accepted as a great yogi, philosopher and poet, but was considered to be dry and dreary. His sublime philosophical writings dating from the Arya-period were perhaps responsible for this popular misconception. During his political life too he was branded as ’the man who never smiles’. Even to his disciples who saw him only four times a year, he appeared grave and austere, yet with a quiet compassion which made him so lovable as a Guru.

When I wrote to him complaining that his ”Himalayan austerity and grandeur take my breath away, making my heart palpitate!” he replied: ”O rubbish! I am austere and grand, grim and stern! every blasted thing I never was! I groan in an un-Aurobindian despair when I hear such things. What has happened to the common sense of all of you people ? In order to reach the Overmind it is not at all necessary to take leave of this simple but useful quality. Common sense by the way is not logic (which is the least common sense-like thing in the world), it is simply looking at things as they are without inflation or deflation-—not imagining wild imaginations—or for that matter, despairing ’I know not why’ despairs.”

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Author: Nirodbaran
Print Length: 105p.
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Submitted by: Avinash Tiwari
Book format: Pdf, ePub, Kindle
Language: English
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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.

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

Print Length: 186 pages

Publisher: Mother India

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Language: English Read more

Companion to Vedic Verses in ‘The Life Divine’ – Vol. II by Mukund Ainapure

Companion to Vedic Verses in ‘The Life Divine’ – Vol. II

All the chapters of CWSA Volume 21 & 22 – The Life Divine – have, below the title, translated quotations from the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and other Sanskrit texts. Sri Aurobindo called these quotations (or, chapter-opening epigraphs) “mottoes”.

The present volume provides the original Sanskrit verses from the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and other Sanskrit texts in Devanagari (without accents), translated and cited by Sri Aurobindo in the “mottoes” in The Life Divine-II (CWSA Volume 22).

The compiler has provided the Padpātha (in Devanagari as well as Roman Transcrip-tion) 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) indi-cated; and matched each Sanskrit word in the Padpātha with the corresponding English word in the Translation using superscripts, followed by footnotes providing alternative meaning(s) of words and explanatory Notes based on Sri Aurobindo’s writings.

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Author: Mukund Ainapure
Print Length: 155
Publisher: Mukund Ainapure
Submitted by: Mukund Ainapure
Book format: Pdf
Language: English
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Companion to Vedic Verses in ‘The Life Divine’ – Vol. I by Mukund Ainapure

Companion to Vedic Verses in ‘The Life Divine’ – Vol. I

All the chapters of CWSA Volume 21 & 22 – The Life Divine – have, below the title, translated quotations from the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and other Sanskrit texts. Sri Aurobindo called these quotations (or, chapter-opening epigraphs) “mottoes”.

The present volume provides the original Sanskrit verses from the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and other Sanskrit texts in Devanagari (without accents), translated and cited by Sri Aurobindo in the “mottoes” in The Life Divine-I (CWSA Volume 21).

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, followed by footnotes providing alternative meaning(s) of words and explanatory Notes based on Sri Aurobindo’s writings.

Book Details

Author: Mukund Ainapure
Print Length: 221
Publisher: Mukund Anapure
Submitted by: Mukund Ainapure
Book format: Pdf
Language: English and Sanskrit
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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

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Complier: Nolini Kanta Gupta
Print Length: 67 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Submitted by: Avinash Tiwari
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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.犀利士
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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 (more…)

At the Feet of the Master by T. Kodandarama Rao

At the Feet of the Master

T. Kodandarama Rao first met Sri Aurobindo in December 1920. A few months later he came to live near him in Pondicherry. He remained until 1924. After his return to Andhra Pradesh, he remained in contact with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and was present at many darshans. More than forty years after his departure from Pondicherry, Kodandarama Rao published his reminiscences under the title At the Feet of the Master. This little book is one of the few records we have of life during the early 1920s in what became the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Book Details

Author: T. Kodandarama Rao
Print Length: 34
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Submitted by: Sergei
Book format: Pdf, ePub, mobi (Kindle)
Language: English
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