A delightful selection of poems created by a long time resident of Auroville, Shraddhavan. Written in an open, free-flowing style, Shraddhavan embraces the world around her, particularly the natural world, as it whispers to her the story of her own evolving spirituality. If we listen quietly, she whispers to us as well.
Almost all of the essays collected in this volume were written for and first published as monthly instalments in Next Future, the e-journal of the Sri Aurobindo Society Pondicherry. The 47 instalments ended with the passing of Dr. Nadkarni in September 2007, and cover Savitri Book by Book, Canto by Canto, from the beginning up to the climactic point in the middle of Book Eleven, where Savitri is offered four boons of merger with the Supreme, and asks instead for the Supreme Peace, Oneness, Energy and Bliss ‘for Earth and Men’. Dr. Nadkarni has written other essays on Savitri as well as giving many other talks, but this collection represents a masterly ‘Introduction’ (as he modestly called it) to the revelatory poem which he loved so much and understood so well. It has been compiled and published at the request of his family, and we feel sure that it will be welcomed by Savitri readers and students all over the world, and to a certain extent make up for the great loss that his many admirers experienced when he passed away in September 2007 at the age of 74.
Since 1980, Shraddhavan has been teaching English in Auroville through close readings of Sri Aurobindo’s revelatory epic Savitri: a legend and a symbol. In August 1998 these classes were resumed at Savitri Bhavan, with a growing number of students, including young Tamil teacher-trainees from the Arul Vazhi School located in Promesse, Auroville. These classes were given the name ‘The English of Savitri’ and they concluded in May of 2009 as this group reached the end of the poem.
This book is based on the transcripts of a new series of classes given by Shraddhavan between August 2009 and October 2010, which have been edited for conciseness and clarity, while aiming to preserve some of the informal atmosphere of the course. Edited transcripts of these classes began to be published serially in the Bhavan’s journal of Study Notes on Savitri, ‘Invocation’, from issue 32 onwards, since it was felt that they may be of interest to a wider audiance. They are now being published in book form in several volumes by Yukta Prakashan publishers of Vadodara. This suggested the idea of collecting the original English articles into a book form as well. This is the first such volume, covering all the five cantos of Book One of the poem, ‘The Book of Beginnings’.
Broad overview of psychology, cosmology and transformational practice of Integral Yoga – a psychological and spiritual methodology for evolutionary transformation of human nature developed by Sri Aurobindo. In 3D motion graphics.
Man is a transitional being…
A psychological and spiritual methodology for evolutionary transformation of human nature.
Psychology
We mean by psychology the study of the psyche (ψυχή) following yogic methodology. It is different from the academic and applied discipline of psychology as it emerged in the West over the last 100 years, involving the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors. The fundamental difference in methodology also leads to very different orientations, discoveries and consequences.
Cosmology
We are presenting here not the cosmology of the physicists but the cosmology as mapped by Sri Aurobindo following the methodology of Integral Yoga. In this view, consciousness is the most fundamental thing in existence and the exploration covers the full spectrum of consciousness and its evolutionary process.
Transformational Practice
Integral Yoga is a methodology Sri Aurobindo developed for not only exploring the profound depths and heights of human psyche but also for an integral evolutionary transformation of the human nature. Here we give a broad overview of the process leading towards psychic, spiritual and supramental transformation.
This little booklet is a powerful triplet of essays first published by Sri Aurobindo in the monthly review Arya in 1915. In his splashing poetic prose, Sri Aurobindo first describes his Superman against the backdrop of the Nietzschean overman and public misconceptions. He then goes on to hammer out the relationships between all-will, free-will and fate. At the last, he commands you to grasp the delight of works with his lilting voice of authority. All together, this little booklet is like a powerful vitamin B shot for the soul.
This volume is a collection of extracts from various letters written by Sri Aurobindo to his disciples in answering their questions about the Integral Yoga. This small volume also contains a glossary of the terms frequently used by Sri Aurobindo and, as far as possible, the definitions are in Sri Aurobindo’s own words.
“Absence of love and fellow feeling is not necessary for nearness to the Divine; on the contrary, a sense of closeness and oneness with others is a part of the divine consciousness into which the sadhak enters by nearness to the Divine and the feeling of oneness with the Divine…. In this Yoga the feeling of unity with others, love, universal joy and Ananda are an essential part of the liberation and perfection which are the aim of the sadhana.”
Sri Aurobindo
“A Witness of creation, if there had been one conscious but uninstructed, would only have seen appearing out of a vast abyss of an apparent nonexistence an Energy busy with the creation of Matter, a material world and material objects, organizing the infinity of the Inconscient into the scheme of a boundless universe or a system of countless universes that stretched around him into Space without any certain end or limit, a tireless creation of nebulae and star-clusters and suns and planets, existing only for itself, without a sense in it, empty of cause and purpose.”
– Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pp. 881-84
The evolution of life on Earth is a fact; Darwinism is one theory among several, based on the research of predecessors like Buffon and Lamarck, and formulated simultaneously with the very similar theory of Alfred Wallace. Besides, what is nowadays generally labelled as Darwinism hardly resembles what Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, but is the result of scientific developments at times considered anti-Darwinian.
This book narrates the relevant events in the history of ‘Darwinism’ and the resulting Social Darwinism and Sociobiology. It also stresses the antagonism of the scientific materialism at its basis and the religious teachings of the origin and evolution of life on our planet. It is this antagonism that has inevitably resulted in the ongoing controversies between creationism, the positivist scientific view of evolution, and ‘intelligent design’. The foundations of physical science as adopted by the biological sciences are examined, as are the motives for the attacks on religion by authors like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Stephen Jay Gould. The book analyses and clearly discerns between the various branches of creationism and intelligent design.
About this book, the author, Rod Hemsell says, “Most of these essays were collected in 2003, a few recent ones have been added to this edition in the sections on philosophy and mantra, but obviously the earliest already contain the same basic insights that underlie the more systematic studies that I have done since 2008, after reading Sri Aurobindo for forty years.”
On the cover of the first edition, Georges Van Vrekhem wrote, “Not only are there in the essays which constitute this volume the philosophical landscapes the author has been and continues exploring, there is also the testimony of his practical commitment to the realization of a better world. As Sri Aurobindo wrote, the whirlpool of the present globalisation may well be the disorienting transition to the unity of humanity, necessary for the realization of the next step in evolution. After all, if evolution is a fact, why would it stop at the human species? It is in this perspective that Auroville, the City of Dawn, the most daring utopia of them all, has to be seen, and it is to the working out of this ideal that Rod Hemsell is contributing with his life. This is a thinker who dares to walk on the roads of infinity and find on them his fulfilment.”
Georges Van Vrekhem, a Flemish Belgian, lived in Auroville from 1978 until his passing on 31st August, 2012.
In that period he published a number of highly seminal books on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother such as Beyond Man, the Life and Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (1997); The Mother, the Story of Her Life (2000); Overman: The Intermediary between the Human and the Supramental Being (2001); Patterns of the Present, from the Perspective of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (2002); Hitler and His God, the Background to the Nazi Phenomenon (2006); Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God (2011), and Preparing for the Miraculous (2012), containing the eleven lectures Georges had given in 2010-2011 at Auroville’s Savitri Bhavan and Town Hall.
In 2006 he was awarded the Sri Aurobindo Puraskar by the Government of Bengal.
At his passing Georges left a number of unpublished essays behind. Some of them were based on his talks in Auroville at the end of 2011, when he embarked on a second series of lectures on a wide variety of topics related to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. However, first Cyclone Thane and later his deteriorating health disrupted these lectures.
This book, which contains his unpublished essays as well as some of his articles and interviews that have been published in the magazines Auroville Today, Mother India, and The Advent, and in the book The Journeying Years, is published to honour Georges Van Vrekhem in recognition of his immense work in helping to understand the life and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wrote and spoke at a time before the awareness of “gender specific language”. Yet, they more than anybody else stood for the importance and dignity of the individual in all its aspects, male and female. For those who are not familiar with their personalities and their work, it may suffice to say that they admitted in their Ashram sadhaks and sadhikas on an equal footing at a time when this was most unusual.
When writing on subjects in connection with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother it is not always possible, however hard one tries, to adapt one’s language to the present sensibilities.
The book before you offers an important new presentation of an aspect of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ’s vision and yogic development. The Mother ’s French term surhomme, meaning the intermediary between the human and the supramental being, has until now been wrongly translated as “superman”, the word which in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s work stands throughout for the supramental being. To end this confusion and to clearly indicate the place the intermediary being occupies in the ongoing evolution beyond humankind, I find it essential to translate surhomme as “overman”.
“We start from the idea that humanity is moving to a great change of its life which will even lead to a new life of the race, – in all countries where men think, there is now in various forms that idea and that hope, – and our aim has been to search for the spiritual, religious and other truth which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour. …”
“As man arose out of animal, so out of man superman shall come,” said Sri Aurobindo. Overman is a metaphysical book which dwells upon the concept of the ultimate progression of man into a highly enlightened species called the supramental being, towards which, the author says, the intermediary stage (the Overman) has already been reached.
Author: Georges Van Vrekhem
Print Length: 202 pages
Publisher: Georges Van Vrekhem
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English
And Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth[1]
– the Mother
On 29 March 1914, a Parisian lady in Pondicherry went around 3 p.m. from the Hôtel d’Europe in the Rue Suffren to no. 41 Rue François Martin. She was Madame Mirra Richard and she had arrived with her husband, Paul, in the sleepy colonial port that very morning. The Richards had boarded the Japanese ship Kagu Maru in Marseilles three weeks earlier, sailed through the Suez Canal up to Colombo, crossed the Palk Strait, boarded the Boat Mail at Danushkodi and arrived safely at their exotic destination.
Paul Richard was a philosopher and a politician. He had first come to Pondicherry four years earlier in order to support a local candidate during the elections for the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. As a French territory, Pondicherry was entitled to two representatives. Richard, however, was also deeply interested in occultism and religion, and his main reason for having travelled to the South Indian town may well have been that he wanted to meet an Indian yogi. In this he had been extraordinarily lucky, for Aurobindo Ghose, the well-known freedom fighter turned yogi, had just arrived in Pondicherry, looking for a safe haven from the British authorities who wanted to arrest him, “the most dangerous man in India”, at any cost. Richard had been deeply impressed by Aurobindo Ghose and had told his wife about him. The reason she accompanied Richard on his second visit to Pondicherry may well have been that he wished her to meet Aurobindo Ghose. Richard’s aim was to get himself elected as a Deputy, but in this he would not succeed.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Mirra had been enthusiastic about undertaking the voyage. On 3 March 1914 she wrote in her diary: “As the day of departure draws near, I enter into a kind of self-communion; I turn with a fond solemnity towards all those thousand little nothings around us which have silently, for so many years, played their role of faithful friends: I thank them gratefully for all the charm they were able to give to the outer side of our life”. This suggests that they planned to stay abroad for a long time. “Then I turn towards the future and my gaze becomes more solemn still. What it holds in store for us I do not know nor do I care to know.”[2] After his first visit to Pondicherry, Paul Richard had brought back a photograph of Aurobindo Ghose and she, despite her advanced occult capacities, had seen only the politician in him.
Therefore, while walking the mile or so from her hotel to the house where Ghose was living with a few companions, all of them Bengali revolutionaries, Madame Richard perhaps had mixed expectations. Paul had already gone out to greet Aurobindo Ghose immediately upon their arrival in the morning; on the occasion of her first meeting with the unknown Indian, Mirra had wanted to see him alone. Expecting nothing, she had nevertheless prepared everything – as we know from her later conversations – and may have been mulling over some thoroughly considered questions in her mind.
There she stood, then, at the bottom of the staircase leading to the first floor, where Aurobindo Ghose was living – and there he stood, at the top: “Exactly my vision! Dressed in the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me and I saw in his eyes that it was He.”[3] For many years Mirra had been visited and guided in her dreams by several masters, one of whom she named Krishna. This “Krishna” always appeared to her in a dress which she, at the time unfamiliar with the Indian dhoti, could not identify and which she therefore thought to be a “costume worn in visions”. Now he stood there before her in the flesh, embodied on earth: Aurobindo Ghose.
The significance of the moment became immediately apparent to her, and we read in her diary entry of the next day: “It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance. He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall indeed be established upon earth.”[4] (“Thy” and “Thou” refer to the Lord, the Divine to whom the diary entries are addressed.) A night had elapsed between the meeting and the entry in her diary, and things were now seen in a certain perspective: “In the presence of those who are integrally Thy servitors, those who have attained the perfect consciousness of Thy presence [in this case Aurobindo Ghose], I become aware that I am still far, very far from what I yearn to realise; and I know that the highest I can conceive, the noblest and purest is still dark and ignorant beside what I should conceive. But this perception, far from being depressing stimulates and strengthens the aspiration, the energy, the will to triumph over the obstacles so as to be at last identified with Thy law and Thy work.”[5]
The importance of the encounter is also obvious from the following entries in her diary. 1 April 1914: “I feel we have entered the very heart of Thy sanctuary and grown aware of Thy very will. A great joy, a deep peace reigns in me, and yet all my inner [mental] constructions have vanished like a vain dream and I find myself now, before Thy immensity, without a frame or system, like a being not yet individualised. All the past in its external forms seems ridiculously arbitrary to me, and yet I know it was useful in its own time. But now all is changed: a new stage has begun.”[6] 3 April: “It seems to me that I am being born into a new life and all the methods, the habits of the past can no longer be of any use. It seems to me that what I thought were results are nothing more than a preparation. I feel as though I have done nothing yet, as though I have not lived the spiritual life, only entered the path that leads to it, it seems to me that I know nothing, that I am incapable of formulating anything, that all experience is yet to begin …” [7]
And on 14 June Mirra wrote: “It is a veritable work of creation we have to do: to create activities, new modes of being so that this Force, unknown on earth till today, may manifest in its plenitude. To this work I am consecrated, O Lord, for this is what Thou wantest of me. But since Thou hast appointed me for this work, Thou must give me the means, that is, the knowledge necessary for its realisation … Thou hast made a promise, Thou hast sent into these worlds those who can and that which can fulfil this promise. This now demands Thy integral help so that what has been promised may be realised. In us must take place the union of the two wills and two currents, so that from their contact may spring forth the illuminating spark. And since this must be done, this will be done.”[8]
These are mysterious words which this book will have to explain. Which new modes of being were to be created? What promise was made to her by “the Lord” Himself? What was that something new that had to be realised? Radical words too, charged with a will to confront all obstacles and aware of the beginning of a new epoch in the history of humanity.
…