Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Vivekanada and Sri Aurobindo Were Ahead Of Their Time



Sri Aurobindo on Vivekananda
«In vindicating ancient things it has been obliged to do so in a way that will at once meet and satisfy the old mentality and the new, the traditional and the critical mind. This in itself involves no mere return, but consciously or unconsciously hastens a restatement. And the riper form of the return has taken as its principle a synthetical restatement; it has sought to arrive at the spirit of the ancient culture and, while respecting its forms and often preserving them to revivify, has yet not hesitated also to remould, to reject the outworn and to admit whatever new motive seemed assimilable to the old spirituality or apt to wide the channel of its larger evolution. Of this freer dealing with past and present, this preservation by reconstruction, Vivekananda was in his life-time the leading exemplar and the most powerful exponent. But this too could not be the end; of itself it leads towards a principle of new creation.»

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Satprem was right




So let's become and conquer as Rishi Agastya said:
"Let us have the taste of even all the contesting forces,
Let us conquer indeed even here,
Let us run this battle-race of a hundred leadings..."

(Letter to an Auroville woman. Note in the margin: "Not sent, except to the Devil!")
The game of the Asura is always the same, throughout all of human spiritual history: it catches a bit of the Truth, and with the very force of the Truth it has swallowed, it develops its Falsehood. The danger of the Falsehood is not Falsehood, if I dare say, but the portion of Truth that has been swallowed and that helps strengthen the Falsehood. The true Asura is not the "devil" whom everybody knows is dark and wicked, but the little saint who uses the Truth and utters the words of Truth for his selfish ends. In the name of Christ's "Love," more than one "heretic" was imprisoned and tortured and burnt. In the name of "nonviolence," they betrayed the true Shakti of India and encouraged a mass of spiritual calves who meditate seated on the rot of the country. The greatest crimes and the greatest betrayals have always been committed in the name of Truth, it goes without saying. In the name of Mother and Sri Aurobindo and the "Ideal of Human Unity," they imprison some Aurovilian brothers and hire dubious lawyers. In the name of this much-vaunted "Unity," they expel Satprem from the Ashram, take away the visas of the dissidents or the rebels, and at the same time, say: let's embrace Navajata, let's embrace Shyamsundar — let's embrace one another, we are all "One," aren't we? No, little one, I don't know if it is the "Truth," but it is mental rot. The "spiritual" arguments of the person you speak of smell bad — it is a corpse of the decaying Truth. You must choose, you must know what you want and on which side you stand. It is this courage that is needed. During the war too, we heard more than one traitor, in the name of the "Unity of France," proclaim collaboration with the troops of the Gestapo.
Unity is all very well, but we have first to deserve it: you don't create unity by putting a viper in your pocket, or else it will bite you and so much the better, if you are silly enough to put a viper in your pocket.
Truth is not something that is like a fried egg: it is something that becomes itself and conquers itself. Unity is not something that exists like a pair of spiritual slippers. It is something that becomes itself and conquers itself at each instant against a thousand enemies.
So let's become and conquer as Rishi Agastya said:
"Let us have the taste of even all the contesting forces,
Let us conquer indeed even here,
Let us run this battle-race of a hundred leadings..."
(Rig-Veda I. 179)
That's it.
Satprem

source: http://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/satprem/carnets_of_an_apocalypse_0002_e.htm