Devotion, surrender, faith, obedience are the very fundamentals of yoga and are not merely part of religion

Savitri Era: Join Savitri Era Party

Writing a passionate blog post or a newspaper column or being engaged in animated discussion about the state of the nation is not enough. Join Savitri Era Party to give shape to your concern for the country. [TNM]

Alok Pandey Responds to Debashish Banerji

DB contradicts himself by saying that most people in the Ashram are not there for sadhana and at the same time concluding that they created a homogeneous approach. This could mean either of the two:

a. The approach of this “inchoate” mass is not an approach to sadhana.

b. Or else the large majority have taken an approach to sadhana which is not the right approach to be taken in the Ashram.

In the first case, he is contradicting himself. In the second, he himself is redefining the sadhana as it should be in the Ashram…

But let this much be known that it is most dangerous to turn this controversy surrounding a single author into a west-east, intellect-devotion and other such divides. This would be to read things that were never intended by us…

Another repeated presumption he seems to make, perhaps quite unconsciously (though it is very implicit in what he says), is that devotion is religious whereas intellectualisation is spiritual. The Religion that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not want is the traditional kind – mechanical outer rituals, the proclamation that ours is the only or the best path etc. But devotion, surrender, faith, obedience are the very fundamentals of yoga and are not merely part of religion. They are the first elementary lessons and the basics of spiritual life. I am surprised how people who have read Sri Aurobindo for so long can still be prone to this confusion. Alok Pandey 28 March 2010  from A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs 

How to Create the Work You Love -- Rick Jarow's Workshop at CIIS ... PR Web
The “Creating the Work You Love” workshop taught by Rick Jarow, author, Vassar College Associate Professor and pioneer of the anti-career movement, takes place at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA on Sunday, April 11, 2010.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) March 28, 2010 -- If you’re ready to finally have work you truly love, work that is in alignment with your life’s calling, register for Rick Jarow’s “Creating the Work You Love” workshop on Sunday, April 11, 2010, at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA. The workshop, based on Jarow’s renowned book by the same name, starts at 10:00 am and ends at 5:00 pm. Registration is $135.

Satheesh S (ssatheesh1963@gmail.com)

It is also intriguing to find that Mr. RYD doesn't seem to make a fuss about the other editions that preceded the 1993 edition of the Savitri. These editions were published during "The Mother's" time and I believe that She evidently approved of those later editions of the Savitri.

So does Mr. RYD mean that "The Mother" was equally wrong to allow changes to be made to the 1950-51 editions? Did She err before the year 1972 when she oversaw the work that was being undertaken by Mr. Nirodbaran and Mr. Amal Kiran which resulted in the earlier editions of the Savitri, which our self-appointed priest, visionary, scholar and enlightened soul has declared as inferior to the version which he considers "sacred"? 4:40 PM

Mamata dash replied to kalpana's discussion 'What does your soul rejoice in?'

When I think of the Divine I feel a presence within me.. and then I see Mother an Sri. Aurobindo together. from ASPIRATION - Aspiration is a call to the Divine. — The Mother

Harriet Mendonca added a blog post THE URGENCY - THE PROBLEM OF LIFE

Either man must fulfill himself by satisfying the Divine within him or he must produce out of himself a new and greater being who will be more capable of satisfying it. He must either himself become a divine humanity or give place to Superman. SRI… from ASPIRATION - Aspiration is a call to the Divine. — The Mother

India - Auroville - 2010: Language By Peter Choate

Language here becomes a bit of a funny business when we end up with groups from around the world who struggle to find ways to communicate with each other through often rudimentary skills or translations from others who are a bit more fluent. Last night, for example, we had French, English, German, Korean, Estonian and English at our table with an Indian dialect and Italian at the other. Two people at our table in particular struggled. The Korean lady has about as many words in English as I do in Tamil. The German lady is better in English but often missed grander bits of the conversation if her husband does not translate. In essence, lack of language skills can be isolating even with well intentioned efforts by those around…

In music, language takes on a different meaning that transcends verbal comprehension. Two nights ago we were invited to sit in on the final rehearsal of the amateur opera group. They have very solid conducting and many possess quite developed voices. They sang in English, French, Italian, German and Russian. It was a remarkably pleasant evening. One of many such evenings here… Yet, the chances of again seeing them are low and one wonders what the common ground between us is beyond this joint venture of time in Auroville. Is there are language between us that transcends this common time? 

‘English cannot be given primacy over the language of our culture’ from Agent Provocateur by Kanchan Gupta

Pavan K Varma, in conversation with Kanchan Gupta, says the local must prevail over the foreign (Pavan K Varma’s book, Becoming Indian — The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity has just been published by Penguin.) [This interview was published in The Pioneer on Friday, March 26, 2010.]

KG: Nothing offers a better platform than a book for a study and discourse of this nature... By the way, some people feel you have been needlessly uncharitable towards English and Western culture...
PKV: There is hardly any space left for cerebral discourse. There has been an oversimplification of what I have to say in my book. One is that I am against English. I am not. I am not for the imposition of Hindi. I am just saying that there must be respect given to our languages and while English is an indispensable language of communication, specially to help us interface with a globalising world, it cannot be given primacy over the language of our culture.

There is a language of communication and there is a language of culture. The language of culture is a window to your history, mythology, folklore, proverbs, idioms, to your creativity ... and it’s the language in which we cry and laugh. There is no contradiction between the two. Recent research shows that all those who are well-grounded first in their mother tongue pick up a foreign language that much faster.

KG: Do you believe English is still a foreign language in India?

PKV: I genuinely believe that while it is a language of communication which has been indigenised in India, it can never take the place of our natural languages. And, badly spoken English cannot become the lingua franca of a country which is so rich in its linguistic heritage.