Sri Aurobindo Devotees Trust: ‘Prayers to
Sriannai’ Sasi balika vidya Mandir, Azad Road, R.S. Puram, 9.30 a.m.; Sri Annai
Meditation Centre, WTC Kovaipudur, 4 p.m.
Puducherry
prescription: separate buses, overcoats for girls Separate buses for
schoolboys and schoolgirls, overcoats for girls, ban on mobile phones on
campuses and restricted interaction of girls and boys — these are the steps the
Puducherry government has decided on to enforce to prevent harassment of girl
students… By reducing contact between boys and girls, it was possible to
prevent basic misbehaviour and it would also reduce "temptation,"
said an Education Department official… The measures drew flak from academicians
and activists.
06: This was the Day when Satyavan must die from Savitri Savitri is now ready; she is absolutely calm, that she can now hold the
divine force. Immobile in herself, she gathers force.
Yes, this is the day
when Satyavan is to die. On this day Savitri is immobile, a luminous vibrant
living statue of golden yogic stillness, she knows already that her lover is
going to die shortly. She is not disturbed; she is calm and collected, holding
the divine power in her soul, holding it in its strength to confront Death at
the predestined moment. There is a purpose behind this death, in this
particular death, and it is that purpose which is significant. Satyavan has to
die if something new has to happen. He has to die to his past in order that the
future enters in. If it has to be a new manifestation, he has to set aside his past,
shed it away, dissolve it in death.
He must die to the past; in him the past
must die. He the incarnate divine soul has been under the clutch of ignorance
and fate—that is the past, and that past must go away, it must vanish. Only
when it goes away can things move forward. And it is with it that the work of
Savitri is connected. Actually, it may not be Savitri who is seeing the
necessity of the death, the death of her husband. It is present elsewhere,
present in its timeless logicality and detail. Indeed, ‘must’ has in it all
those contents, all those far-reaching implications. The Yogi-Poet has the
knowledge of everything, of all the divisions of the endless time. “This was
the day when Satyavan must die.” That is the celebration of this transformative
death. In it is the golden imperative of the coming day.
Karma is frequently understood to be a law
of cause and effect, but rarely do we dig deeper to understand how this works.
This leads to a lot of generalizations that may not be entirely correct when
examined more closely. One of these generalizations tends to treat the action
of Karma as some kind of automatic cause/effect mechanism such as we see in the
laws of physics expounded by the early Western physicists. “For every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction” for instance, as well as the mechanical
laws of motion, mass and momentum. If it were only that simple!
While we are treating Karma as some kind of
mechanism, we also want it to have a moral and ethical component, but we now
have something of a conflict. In the physical world, a “cause” may lead to an
effect that redounds, not upon the “doer” but on some other party who perhaps
was innocent and unaware of the action. For instance, a mountain climber could
make a loud sound in a glacier region and trigger an avalanche which buried a
number of people, but not the person who instigated it! We can come up with any
number of scenarios where “cause and effect” on the physical plane clearly
visits its results on others than those undertaking the initiating action.
To understand the complexity of what is
intended by the concept of Karma, and its necessary connection to the process
of rebirth, we need to step back from the purely mechanical aspects and see it
as an implementation mechanism for the evolutionary development that takes
place through rebirth to bring about the development of consciousness in a
systematic outflowering through Time.
For those who hold that there is only an
“All-Soul” and no reality to the individual soul, there is clearly no rationale
for there being any necessity for rebirth, as the growth, and reaping of
consequences at the individual level basically would have no meaning. There
would be an “All-Soul” undertaking actions through innumerable forms and
beings, and it would not really matter that the consequences would fall on
others, or on future generations, rather than the individual carrying out the
action.
We actually can see that the action of the
individual can and does impact not just the individual undertaking the action,
but others, both in the present and in the future. Some religious or
philosophical directions have created colorful descriptions around this phenomenon
when they speak of the “sins of the father being visited on the sons” down
through many generations.
The impact on the individual becomes real,
and requires rebirth for its effectuation, if we attribute a reality to the
individual soul. The impact on others nevertheless still occurs and becomes
what we may describe as something of a “collective Karma”.
Written by Anurag Banerjee with a foreword
by Dr. Ananda Reddy (Director, Sri Aurobindo Centre of Advanced
Research, Pondicherry ),
the first edition of this ...
This book is a compilation of Sri
Aurobindo’s replies to elementary questions about Yoga raised by a disciple
during the years 1933 to 1936. It was first published in 1953 and reissued in
1956. In 1991 the text was reproduced as the first part of Commentaries on
“Elements of Yoga” by the Mother. Elements of Yoga is now being issued
independently again in a second edition. Read more
The Arcades Project
- Walter
Benjamin, Rolf
Tiedemann - 1999 - Preview - More
editions Proust speaks of the "thoroughly alive and creative
sleep of the unconscious ... in which the things that barely touch us
succeed in carving an impression, in which our hands take hold of the key
that turns the lock, the key for which we have sought in vain." [K8,3]
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