(அரவிந்தம்-150)
Under the stress of alien impacts she (India - Hindu) has largely lost hold not of the structure of that dharma, but of its living reality. For the religion of India is nothing if it is not lived.
It has to be applied not only to life, but to the whole of life; its spirit has to enter into and mould our society, our politics, our literature, our science, our individual character, affections and aspiration.
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Student - K M Munshi: How, Nationalism could be developed ? Prof Aurobindo: ( pointing to a wall - map ) Look at that map. Learn to find in it the portrait of Bharatmata.
The cities, mountains, rivers and forests are the materials which we go to make up Her body. The people inhabiting the country are the cells which go to make up Her living issues. Our literatures is Her memory and speech.
The spirit of our Culture is Her soul. The happiness and freedom of Her children is Her solvation.
Behold Bharat as a living Mother, meditate upon Her and worship Her in the the ninefold way of Bhakti.
-Bhavan's Journal (22.7.1962)
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The Sanatana Dharma, that is nationalism. This is the message that I have to speak to you. ***
India is India. After a short time every foreign element either gets absorbed or rejected. And life here is different from life in Europe. ***
When I began yoga, I came to an impasse, unable to go further. My brother then directed me to a Yogi (Vishnu Bhaskar Lele) who had certain powers. I remained with him for ten days. He told me to sit beside him and consciously drive away any thoughts that would appear. I did this and after three days my mind was calm and peaceful, unwavering.
Thought floated before me, I saw them and was aware of them, but I was no longer their plaything.
***
Whatever temporary rotting and destruction this crude inpact of European life and culture as caused, it gave three needed inpulses.
It revived the dormant intellectual and critical impulse ;
it put habilitated life and awakened the desire of new creation ;
it put the reviving Indian spirit face to face with novel conditions and ideals and urgent necessity of understanding, assimilating and conquering them.
The National mind turned a new eye on its past culture, reawoke to its sense and import, but also at the same time saw it in their relation to modern knowledge and ideas.
***
In spiritual life, one must always be ready to reject all systems and constructions. For a time a certain form is useful; then it becomes a hindrance. ***
When I began yoga, I came to an impasse, unable to go further. My brother then directed me to a Yogi (Vishnu Bhaskar Lele) who had certain powers. I remained with him for ten days. He told me to sit beside him and consciously drive away any thoughts that would appear. I did this and after three days my mind was calm and peaceful, unwavering.
Thought floated before me, I saw them and was aware of them, but I was no longer their plaything.
***
Even if science - Physical Science or Occult Science - were to discover the necessary conditions or means for an indefinite survival of the body, still, if the body could not adapt itself so as to become a fit instrument of expression for the inner growth, the soul would find some way to abandoned it and pass on to a new incarnation. The material or physical cause of death are not its sole or its true cause; its true inmost reason is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new being. ***
The Divinity acts according to the consciousness of the Truth above and the Leela below and it acts according to the need of the Leela, not according to men's ideas of what it should do should not do. ***
There is a region in us which is above space and time, immobile, immutable at first; it does not participate in the waves of emotions and thoughts. The first aim is to centre one's consciousness in this region and keep it there; this is Mukti.
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…that is the true patriotism which sees God as the Mother in our country, God as Sakti in the mass of our countrymen, and religiously devotes itself to their service and their liberation from present suffering and servitude.***
Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism...
***
with India rests the future of the world. Whenever she is aroused from her sleep, she gives forth some wonderful shinning ray of light to the world which is enough to illuminate the nations. Others live for centuries on what is to her the thought of a moment. ***
God gave to her (India) the book of Ancient Wisdom and bade her keep it sealed in her heart, until the time should come for it to opened.
Sometimes a page or a chapter is revealed, sometimes it only a single sentence.
Such sentences have been the inspiration of ages and fed humanity for many hundreds of years.
***
All great movements of life in India as begun with a new spiritual thought and usually a new religious activity. What more striking and significant fact can there be than this that even the new European influence, which was an influence intellectual, rationalistic, so often anti - religious, and which drew so much of its idealism from the increasingly Cosmopolitan, mundane and secularist thought of the 18th and 19th centuries, precipitated in India from the very first and attempt at religious reformation and led actually to the creation of new religions?
The instinct of the Indian mind was that, if a reconstruction of ideas and of society was to be attempted, it must start from a spiritual basis and take from the first a religious motive and form.
***
Whatever temporary rotting and destruction this crude inpact of European life and culture as caused, it gave three needed inpulses. It revived the dormant intellectual and critical impulse;
it put habilitated life and awakened the desire of new creation;
it put the reviving Indian spirit face to face with novel conditions and ideals and urgent necessity of understanding, assimilating and conquering them.
The National mind turned a new eye on its past culture, reawoke to its sense and import, but also at the same time saw it in their relation to modern knowledge and ideas.
***
We in India fell under the influence of the foreigner's Maya which completely processed our souls. It was the Maya of the alien rule, alien civilization, the powers and the capacities of the alien people who happened to rule over us. These were as if so many shackles that put our physical, intellectual and moral life into bondage.
We went to school with aliens, we allowed the aliens to teach us and drew our minds away from all that was great and good us.
We consider ourselves unfit for the self - government and political life, we looked to the England as our examplar and took her as our saviour.
And all this was Maya, and bondage... We help them to destroy what life there was in India.
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She ( India) will create her own conditions, find out the secret of order which Socialism in vain struggles to find and teach the people of the earth once more how to harmonise the world and the spirit. ***
India is the Guru of the nations, the physician of the human soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to new - mould the life of the world and restore the peace of the human spirit. History lays much stress on events, a little on speech, but has never realised the importance of souls ..... Only the eyes of the seer can pick them out from the mass and trace to their source these immense vibrations
***
The world waits for the raising of India to receive the divine flood in its fullness. ***
Tributes
“Aurobindo shone for years as the brightest star on the Indian firmament. His association with the National Education movement at its inception lent dignity and charms to the cause...
-Pattabhi Sitaramyya
(from 'History of Congress')
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In 1920, when I (A B Purani ) met him for the second time I asked him: “What are you waiting for ?”- for, the Divine Consciousness was already there in him.He never wanted to declare his divinity. The answer he gave was characteristic of his impersonal and wonderful balance of mind.
He said: “The divine is there, but the divine consciousness has yet to descent into and transform the whole of nature and until the physical is transformed the work of the Divine is not done”.
Anyone else, less capable than he, would have run away with the certitude, ‘the Divine is there, everything is done.’ But the pure disciplined intellect can perceive how much more is yet to be done.
-A B Purani
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Nationalism with him (Aurobindo Ghosh) is not a political or economic cry ; it is the innermost hunger of his whole soul for the rebirth in him and through men like him, in the whole of India, of the ancient culture of Hindustan in its pristine purity and nobility.He was an intellectual thinker of the highest type, and an accomplished and versatile scholar ; but his profound scholarship and his keen and penetrating logic were subordinated to the master passion of his soul, the mystic yearning to realise himself in his God, in his country......
-M. A. Buch, M.A., Ph.D.,
Ex- Prof of philosophy,
Baroda College
***
Compiled by: Thiruninravur Ravikumar
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