inside the sri aurobindo ashram archives

Fall 2005 Collaboration • 1

Journal of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the MotherFall 2005 Vol. 30, no. 3

Inside the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives

2 • Collaboration Fall 2005

Table of contentsCollaboration, vol. 30, no. 3, Fall 2005

From the office of Collaboration

Notes on this issue ....................................................................................... 3

Current affairs

AUM 2005: Breaking through barriers at Fort Warden ............. Grace Aroha 4

AV almanac

Work on the Matrimandir progressing quickly ............................................. 6The ultimate relief: the gift of peace .........................................Bhavana Dee 7

A tapestry of the Divine ................................................... Sraddhalu Ranade 8

Chronicles

Inside the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives .......................... Archives Team 11

Essay

Technology and the titan (conclusion) ................................ Richard Carlson 23

Source material

The problem of human disunity ............................................. Sri Aurobindo 30The collective and the individual in the supramental manifestation .............

..................................................................................... The Mother 30

The poetry room

From Love and death ............................................................. Sri Aurobindo 32She truly loved ....................................................................... Shyam Kumari 32A quarry lagoon ........................................................................ Joseph Kent 33

Before dawn, at the sea ............................................................ Navaja Llope 34

September ................................................................................ Larry Seidlitz 34Perch fishing ..........................................................................Rick Lipschutz 35

When I look at Her ...................................................................... Manas Pati 35

Trust the dream ................................................................... Chandresh Patel 35

Apropos ......................................................................... 36

The authors and poets

Grace Aroha ([email protected])lives at Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham in Lodi,California. She is working to improve communi-cations among Sri Aurobindo centers. Richard Carlson ([email protected]) isPresident/CEO of Pacific Weather Inc., and wasthe main organizer for AUM 2005. Bhavana Dee ([email protected]) di-rects the Village Action Project in Auroville,which assists villagers in the Auroville area devel-op their communities. Joseph Kent ([email protected]) is a memberof the Cultural Integration Fellowship in SanFrancisco and an author of two books of poetry. Shyam Kumari, an Ashram member for 36years, is an author, poet, editor, and managingdirector of a Sanskrit school in Pondicherry([email protected]). Rick Lipschutz ([email protected])is a medical transcriptionist in San Francisco,and a member of the Cultural Integration Fel-lowship. Navaja Llope ([email protected]), a long-time devotee from the U.S., is a graphic artistwho lives in Pondicherry, India. Manas Pati ([email protected]) isa graduate student at the University of Hydera-bad, India, and is a frequent visitor to theAshram in Pondicherry. Sraddhalu Ranade is a life-long member ofthe Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and a gifted speakeron the Integral Yoga ([email protected]). Larry Seidlitz ([email protected])facilitates online coures for Sri Aurobindo Dar-shan: The University of Tomorrow, Pondicherry,and is editor of Collaboration.

About the cover

Shelves of documents cover the wall of alarge ground floor room of the Sri AurobindoAshram Archives. (Photo by Larry Seidlitz)


Collaboration (ISSN 0164-1522) is pub-lished by the Sri Aurobindo Association (SAA),a California nonprofit religious corporation,P.O. Box 163237, Sacramento, CA 95816USA; e-mail: [email protected]; phone:209-339-3710, ext. 6; fax: 916-451-9039.Copyright © 2005.

Photos of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother,passages from their works, and excerpts fromthe books published by the Sri AurobindoAshram Trust are © Sri Aurobindo AshramTrust unless otherwise noted, and are used herewith the kind permission of the Ashram. Theopinions expressed in Collaboration are notnecessarily those of the editors or the SAA.

Staff for this issue: Larry Seidlitz, edi-tor and layout; Kim Agrawal, proofreader.

Subscriptions: A one-year subscription(three issues) to Collaboration is $20 ($32 forairmail outside the USA; in India only, Rs. 150to Larry Seidlitz, 39 Vanniar St., Vaithikuppam,Pondicherry 605012). A patron subscription is$40 or more for three issues; a sponsorship sub-scription for residents of India is $4.

Submissions: Collaboration welcomeswriting, photos, and artwork relevant to theIntegral Yoga and spirituality. Submit materialby email to: [email protected]; by faxat 209-339-3715; or by post to Collaboration,P.O. Box 163237, Sacramento, CA 95816USA. Collaboration cannot be held responsiblefor loss or damage of unsolicited material. Let-ters to the editor may be published unless youindicate otherwise. Letters and articles may beedited for style and space considerations.

About SAA: The Sri Aurobindo Associa-tion distributes information about Sri Auro-bindo, the Mother, and Auroville and supportsvarious projects related to the Sri AurobindoAshram, Auroville, and Integral Yoga activitiesin America. Current officers: Theresa Boschert,coordinator; Kalpana Patel, treasurer; Chand-resh Patel, secretary.

Contributions: Donations for the workof the SAA, Auroville, and the Sri AurobindoAshram may be sent to SAA. Donations are taxexempt under section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. In-ternal Revenue Code.

From the office of Collaboration

In this issue, we feature a lengthy interview with six of the members of the Sri Auro-bindo Ashram Archives and Research Library. Three of the members are American,Bob Zwicker, Peter Heehs, and Richard Hartz; one is from The Netherlands and is

well-known in the U.S., Matthijs Cornelissen; and the other two are Indian, RanganathRaghavan and Raman Reddy. Despite their pressing work, they were very gracious ingranting my request for the interview and opening their doors and minds to our readers.After some preliminary discussion on the idea for the interview and providing me withsome background reading, we spent the latter part of a Friday afternoon in the Archivesoffices discussing the history and work of the Archives department. After my transcrip-tion of the tape-recording and first pass in editing it, several of the members carefullywent through it and clarified and elaborated on some of the dialogue. The result is, Ithink, a very readable and interesting account of the history and work of the Archives.

The major project with which the Archives has been involved during the last eightyears is the publication of the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, which is coming out afew volumes at a time and is still underway. This edition differs from the previous collec-tion, The Sri Aurobindo Birth Cententary Library edition, in two main respects: it in-cludes more material, and all the material is being carefully examined for accuracy usingall available manuscripts, typescripts, and printed editions. It is a huge job, and one thatis based on an enormous preliminary work of scrutinizing, organizing, and catalogingmany thousands of documents. In the interview, we discussed this new edition atlength—the work involved, how it is progressing, and some of the new material that itcontains. We also discussed the historical development of the Archives, the preserva-tion of manuscripts, and other important projects that are underway or are planned forthe future.

We also feature the second and concluding part of Richard Carlson’s essay, “Tech-nology and the titan.” In the first part, Richard introduced us to the idea of technology asa “medium that allows us to flawlessly interface with phenomena that otherwise wouldremain physically or psychologically distant.” We were shown an array of new technol-ogies from the frontiers of science that pose fascinating possibilities for good and evil.At its best, the medium of technology becomes virtually invisible, an extension of humanconsciousness. But this invisibility has its dangers, in that technology can and has beenusurped by forces intent on power and profit. In the second part, Rich examines moreclosely the relationship between technology and these forces aimed at power and profit,and the future possibilities resulting from the misuse of technology. We are also shown,in contrast, the future possibility for mankind presented by Sri Aurobindo, and the assis-tance that technology may provide in its realization.

In addition to these feature articles we have a report on the AUM 2005 conference byGrace Aroha, and three essays pertaining to Auroville. The first of these later three es-says gives an update on the work of the Matrimandir. The second, by Bhavana, relates aninteresting and heart-warming account of one result of the relief efforts being made inAuroville following the devastating tsunami. The third article is an inspiring openingaddress made by Sraddhalu Ranade, a respected member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, tothe Auroville International Conference that was held earlier this year. In it, he helps us tosee the significance of Auroville, its deeper nature and intent, and its connection with thedivine work in the world outside.

As usual, we also present source material from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, agood selection of poetry, thought-provoking apropos quotations, many photographs,and in this issue, a digital art piece by Margaret Phanes.

The artists and photographers Lynda Lester ([email protected]) is agifted speaker on the Integral Yoga and is formereditor of Collaboration. Nilauro Markus ([email protected])is the former coordinator for Auroville Interna-tional-USA and an avid photographer. Margaret Astrid Phanes ([email protected])teaches digital media at Maui Community Col-lege and uses her art as a focus for meditation. Larry Seidlitz ([email protected]) iseditor for Collaboration. www.sxc.hu provided stock photographs.


Current Affairs

AUM 2005: Breaking throughbarriers at Fort Worden

By Grace Aroha

The All USA Meeting (AUM) is a collective gatheringof devotees from the U.S. and abroad. It occurs in adifferent city each year, hosted by the local Sri Auro-

bindo center or study group in that locality. This year’s confer-ence was hosted by Rich Carlson and his delightful wife, Nishi, inPort Townsend, Washington, about a two-hour drive northwestof Seattle.

This was my first AUM, so I don’t have a previous point ofreference for comparison. However, my first impression was thatthe entire conference seemed to be carefully synchronized byMother and one might wonder, upon looking back at the event, ifit was necessary to carefully plan and schedule all the activities atall. In fact, the preset schedules magically reformulated them-selves to meet the mood of the moment, the lines between the sea-soned speakers and the attendees blurred, and new presentationsand workshops were re-created on cue.

My experience of the event began at the Seattle airport. I ar-rived expecting to find a car or perhaps a small mini-van waiting tocarry me and a handful of people up to Port Townsend. Instead, Iwas greeted by a crowd of about thirty fellow “Aurobindo familymembers” patiently waiting as each flight arrived and added oneor more members to the troop of devotees queuing up to board theluxury chartered bus arranged by Rich Carlson.

Many of the attendees and speakers were well acquainted;others, like me, were not. Nonetheless the whole clan seemed tomerge together like instant family—a phenomena that was rein-forced by the cheery bus driver who repeatedly referred to us asthe “Carlson family reunion” group as she graciously whisked usup the scenic winding path to our final destination.

As to be expected with the any carefully scheduled event, wearrived at the Fort Worden State Park Conference Center to findorganizers and helpers frantically scurrying about as the busloadof “family members” exited the bus and searched for direction.This temporary period of adjustment worked in our favour by al-lowing each member of the “family” to bond with others, andsmall groups to disperse in various directions to map out the areaand create what would become our “nest” for the next few days.

Our nesting ground, Fort Worden State Park, is a 433-acremulti-use park with 11,020 feet of saltwater shoreline and a widevariety of services and facilities. The park rests on a high bluffoverlooking Puget Sound. Many historic buildings remain at this

19th century military fort. I found it interesting that even the his-torical physical environment upon which our group had chosento converge graciously lent itself to the orchestrated formationthat we were to create over the days that followed.

Our dormitory-style sleeping accommodations were housedin what used to be a military barracks—a cozy foundation for the“Aurobindo troops” to rest, meditate and recharge before eachday’s busy schedule.

Our wake-up call each morning, as opposed to the militantblare of a brass bugle, came in the form of the beautiful, melodi-ous sound of inspired traditional Indian music graciously offeredby Devi Karunamayee from the New Delhi Ashram. Her divine giftnourished our souls in preparation for the day’s activities.

The 100-year old Victorian building that became our maingathering abode contrasted nicely with the newly built dininghall and conference room facilities between which we alternatedthroughout each day. This daily alteration reflected the transitionthat occurred in our discussions between the historical evolutionof man and the evolutionary process that we face today as wemove toward the future.

This year’s conference was entitled “Science & Spirituality:A community dialog on emerging culture.” According to the pro-gram, the purpose of its theme, “The Promise of the Future,” wasto “explore the promise of the future envisaged by Sri Aurobindoand the evolution of consciousness as it manifests in culture,science and our daily lives.” Wow. But how were we to take holdof and conquer such an overpowering topic in only three days?

Fort Worden, along with the heavy batteries of Fort Flaglerand Fort Casey, once guarded a nautical entrance to PugetSound. These posts, established in the 1890s, became the firstline of a fortification designed to prevent a hostile fleet fromreaching such targets as the Bremerton Naval Yard and the citiesof Seattle, Tacoma and Everett. Similarly, the “Aurobindo troops”battled away within the safety of the conference room, putting

Some of the Mother’s soldiers at AUM 2005. (Photo by Lynda Lester)


heads and hearts together to discuss, debate and aspire towardunderstanding, solutions and collaboration around the complextopics put before us.

Fortunately, we had been well-armed with a winning line-upof sincere devotees cum speakers well-equipped to unload theirknowledge, experience and aspiration with the troops. Presentersand panellists from the more well-known “Sri Aurobindo family”included: Debashish Banerji, Aster Patel, Alok Pandey, MatthijsCornelissen, Lynda Lester, Rod Hemsell, Neeltje Huppes, DavidHutchinson, Ameeta Mehra, Michael Miovic, Savitra (Alan Lith-man) and Lakshman Sehgal. In addition, we welcomed specialguests Allan Combs, author of The Radiance of Being, and JoeSubbiondo, President of the California Institute of IntegralStudies.

The conference theme was strategically divided into sub-topics that were presented by speakers and panel groups. Theline-up included: The promise of the future: Sri Aurobindo’s epis-temology and cognitive science, Integral Yoga and the ecology ofspeed, Future community, The psychic being and the evolvingbody, The body in its search for the future, Structures of the brainand evolution of the psychic being, Integral Yoga and the futureparadigm of science, Integral education, and Science—the newparadigm: mind to supermind.

The emphasis of the conference format was on café-styleconversations of small groups and panel discussions. Unlike atypical military unit, this allowed the “commanders and chiefs” tomerge with the “soldiers” and all became one smooth functioningmachine. In tune with our historical setting, we militarily dividedourselves into smaller units by sounding off a number from one toten and obediently rendezvousing with our assigned group. Ishare with you Richard’s view of this less traditional conferenceformat. “What I believe the small groups did besides breaking upthe natural tendency to form cliques with people you alreadyknow was to distribute the responsibility for providing insightsto the whole community who were present. Everyone’s thoughts,ideas and feelings were given honor and value. I believe that thebreak-out into randomly organized groups both adds to more in-timate relationships of the community and, in an integrative man-ner, honors everyone’s experience of doing the integral yoga.”

The knowledge-sharing, ideas and inspirations that cameout of this could fill a book (or several books). I share with youhere only a few of the ideas and questions that my logical brainwill allow me to coherently discharge two weeks after the event.

• We are now in the “Common Era” where the world of God isall around us and there is no longer a need to become a priest toexperience God.

• We reside in an intelligent universe with a new spiritualitywhich is also a new materiality. Is there another future that co-exists with this?

• What is the future? The future is not the present extendingitself. We are not the creators of the future, we are beings createdin the image of the future.

• The future is always present and the past is always present.• We are what we know and we know what we are.• The psychic being is the divine kernel in us. It is here where

the transformation will take place. The supermind cannot bebased in the sense mind. The sense mind is made up of reflec-tions. Knowledge of reality comes from within.

• How does the exponential advance of scientific/technolog-ical evolution complement or contrast with integral yoga for thefuture evolution of the species?

• We are the ones we are waiting for. We need to survive longenough to transform.

• What is it that matter is telling us?• The secret of harmony is union in the Mother. Organize col-

lective life around Her (not the concept of her).• Remember the Mother in every activity, consecrating each

act to the Mother with a will to surrender.• Science separated from spirituality is a very dangerous

thing. The will to power and omniscience drives science.To further insure that all aspects of our being received train-

ing towards the divine transformation to come, we were also sup-plied with a creative array of mini-workshops to choose from: cre-ative dance, art and meditation, devotional vocal music, hathayoga, integral education, exploration of the planes and parts ofthe being, and Savitri for the post-modern consciousness.

All this in three days! Perhaps we had overcome the “eco-logy of speed,” or perhaps we had reached the point of no return.Certainly, like the massive fortifications that had once dominatedthe landscape of Fort Worden, we had managed to further breakthrough the barriers to human unity and conscious evolution.

Until next year, I leave you with a battle cry from the words ofSri Aurobindo written in Bande Mataram, “The little that is doneseems nothing when we look forward and see how much we haveyet to do.”

Going over battle plans at Fort Worden. (Photo by Lynda Lester)


AV almanac

Work on the Matrimandirprogressing quickly

This article is reprinted with permission from the June 2005Matrimandir Newsletter

The Matrimandir is pushing ahead towards completion withan increasingly remarkable and visible speed. In the monthof May, when the temperatures climb to 40 degrees Cel-

sius. and the human beings on the scene tend to drip with sweatand droop in the blazing sun, it’s as if the Matrimandir itself haddecided to counterbalance this season’s natural slowdown bymoving things ahead at an even faster pace.

Take, for example, the scene that is visible any morning from avantage point 100 meters from the main sphere on the North axis:some 70 people, divided into three teams, can be seen busy atwork up on the structure. They start work at 6 a.m. to beat the heatof the day. One team, on the left, is putting the discs back up onthe outer skin, for on that quadrant the new waterproofing layerhas been applied from top to bottom. Row by horizontal row, theshining golden discs are being remounted on their stainless steellegs.

To their right, two other teams are at work: the one lowerdown is applying the fresh waterproofing coat to the outer skin,while a third team is busy, some ten meters higher, building thescaffolding and preparing platforms for the team that will removethe discs.

As if one group were chasing the other, each team worksquickly to stay ahead of the one behind it, for nobody wants theirteam to be accused of holding up the work! These acrobatics onthe Matrimandir are well coordinated now that we have the hangof it, and the progress of the work is very visible.

Coming back to our position on the North axis, and listening,one can hear the steady rumble of a large diesel-fuelled air com-pressor which sits on the West axis, just beyond the large petalssurrounding the Matrimandir. It is supplying air to the sand-blast-ing gun of a fourth team which is at work early today. This team isbusy inside the Matrimandir, removing the paint from a section ofone of the two spiral ramps that lead from the second level up tothe Inner Chamber. Sandblasting is the first step in the process ofrepainting the ramps. The project creates a huge amount of dustinside the building, despite the elaborate plastic-and-gunny bagenclosures that have been set up around the work area to containit. It is urgent that this work is done now because it has to be com-pleted before finishing the work on the inner skin. In any case, it isclear now that the work on the Inner Chamber will not be complet-ed before September, and even if it were ready sooner, the access

via the ramp would not be possible until both ramps have beensandblasted. This and the subsequent repainting of both rampsmay take about four months . . . and only then will we be able tomove on to the works which require a dust-free environment fortheir execution.

The Inner Chamber is sealed off from this dust storm and hasits own temporary A/C machine to cool and dry the air insidewhile the work on the ceiling and the installation of the new A/Cducts is going on. The Chamber’s center has been filled by thealuminum scaffolding, built up over the well-shielded crystalglobe to reach the top of the ceiling where the modification workis proceeding smoothly.

On 3 May the original cone at the apex of the ceiling throughwhich the sun’s ray has descended up to now was opened andthe large lens used for focusing the ray was removed. The conehas now been rebuilt in a new form to accommodate severalchanges in the ceiling design. The new central opening willhouse not only the ray-focusing lens, but will also accommodatethe artificial light to be used when there is no sun, as well as al-lowing the cooled A/C air to pass through space into the Cham-ber below. This job is quite complex and will take a few moremonths to complete.

Returning to our station on the North axis outside the Matri-mandir, we cannot help but notice the other activity which is go-ing on at this early morning hour: the constant back and forthmovement of tipper lorries (dump trucks) passing just behind uson the Oval road that encircles the gardens area. The trucks arebusy on the eastern edge of the Oval carrying loads of soil that apowerful excavator is carving out of the earth on a section of theOval road.

Until recently this area was occupied by the old workshopsand offices of Matrimandir. Over the last one year all these struc-tures have been moved outside of the Oval, allowing the presentoperation to get underway. The excavator has been in action for

The golden discs have been removed to enable waterproofingunderneath.(Photo courtesy The Matrimandir Newsletter)


three weeks to bring the ground down to the “zero” level, the av-erage horizontal level given for the whole ring road. On the west-ern end of the gardens, where the old Workers Camp used to be,the level of the ground is below this zero level, so the lorries arebusy carrying the excavated earth to that area, to bring it up to thedesired level. It is a huge work, one that would have taken hun-dreds of men months to do by hand, as it was done 34 years agowhen the crater for Matrimandir’s foundation was excavated.

With this step completed, the gardens area will have beenbrought roughly into the shape required by the original design.Though there is still a lot of fine tuning of the levels to be done inthis freshly excavated section, the bulk of the work is over. Andthe stage is thus set for the next phase: the laying down of thegarden infrastructure, the water and power lines that will feed theirrigation and lighting systems of the future gardens. The creationof this infrastructure is a big job which will be tackled in the com-ing months, while continuing the many other works now under-way to complete the structure by the end of next year.

The ultimate relief: the gift ofpeace

by Bhavana Dee

The two fishing villages of Thanthirayankuppam andNadukuppam are located next to each other on the coast. Theyhave been feuding for years—the young people refuse to speakto anyone from the other village, just like their elders.

After the tsunami of last December, all the fishermen up anddown the coast decided they would not go fishing until the gov-ernment paid the compensation – they didn’t want them to say itwas all fine now, and back to normal, and delay forever their re-ceiving all the money which they know has been collected in theirfavour. That gave those of us in the rehabilitation scene quite achallenge: it has not been possible to just go ahead with gettingeveryone back on their feet, to get over the trauma by getting onwith life as usual, to work off the shock with lots of hard work.Faced with so many healthy young men in enforced idleness, wetook up their request to organise a cricket tournament between allthe cricket clubs of the 23 “kuppams” (fishing villages) whichAuroville is working with. The elders promised that they wouldmaintain law and order.

Alas, when it looked like Thanthirayankuppam would winagainst Nadukuppam (the home team) the youth and even thegrown-ups couldn’t control their emotions, and a brawl brokeout. The game had to be called off, the tournament was stopped,and the elders felt embarrassed and disgraced. Thanthirayankup-pam leaders even drew up plans and an estimate to build a bigwall between the two communities.

But it didn’t end there. When Moris, the Coordinator of Vil-lage Action, went to discuss this with the elders, it came out thatthey had been feuding for years and wanted to take the opportu-nity of Auroville’s presence to settle it. Several preliminary meet-ings had to be held, and several postponements occurred, buteventually the elders of both villages, together with the respect-ed elders of the other villages as well, met. They brought up sto-ries from 10 years ago, they screamed and shouted. Moris wasafraid the Kuilapalayam villagers, in whose Cultural Centre themeeting was being held, might come and protest, adding to thefire, but they didn’t. And finally, they agreed to bury the hatchet,give up their old resentments, and carry on freshly. It was won-derful to see the handshake between the two leaders, the senseof relief as if a great burden were being removed from their shoul-ders, and to see immediately the young men slapping each otheron the back and talking animatedly together.

A few days later, the headman of Chinnamudliarchavadi Kup-pam told Moris, “This is by far the most valuable thing you havegiven us, it is worth more than all the food and boats and hous-es.” We think so too, and feel that the mutual recognition of thisis a tiny step toward human unity, which is our Aurovilian goal.

Amidst work on the apex, the stateliness of the inner chamberremains unperturbed. (Photo courtesy The Matrimandir Newsletter)

High up on the scaffolding: Matrimandir “acrobats” at work. (Photocourtesy The Matrimandir Newsletter)


A tapestryof the Divine

by Sraddhalu Ranade

This talk was given by Sraddhalu on theoccasion of the opening session of theAuroville International meeting in Auro-ville, on 14 January 2005.

Two years ago at the beginning ofthe new year I was in the TibetanPavilion to attend the “thousand

lights” ceremony. It wasn’t the first time Ihad come to Auroville, but somehow, themoment seemed special. There was a feel-ing of something achieved, somethingalive. We were together, but somehow theindividual faces didn’t matter. In the gener-al outline of the silhouettes, one saw thateach person there presented a state ofconsciousness linked to millions all overthe world. In that gathering, I felt that allthese different beings of different coun-tries, nationalities, cultures, types andthreads of human consciousness had beendrawn together by some divine presence,and were tied up, bound together. I had thedistinct sense that something had beenaccomplished, that for the future of theworld, unity is safe, is really accomplishedhere. The rest is a question of “unfoldment”in a certain sense. This is the purpose forwhich Auroville has been established: tomanifest a practical, working human unitywell before its time, something that for therest of the world is still impossible.

All these elements which have beengathered here, which are present herethrough each of us, form part of a threadthat has existed for thousands or even mil-lions of years. Nature has struggled forages to develop specialised lines of con-sciousness so that these lines could splitinto further specialisations. Sometimesthey have merged to then split again. SriAurobindo refers to this constant princi-ple of Nature that she takes a single traitand opens from it many lines of specialiseddevelopment. When each line has beenfulfilled to its extreme, lines which may

even appear to be opposite, she bringsthem all back together to unite them in aricher, wider, larger harmony. In the presentphase of human evolution all these linesare being brought together. But preciselybecause these lines often have specializ-ing, contradictory directions, the struggleto find the harmony is greater.

There is a certainty of a success be-cause nature has drawn each line from anoriginating truth. But to tie them all togeth-er and harmonize and unite them, Naturehas to struggle. It is as if Nature is weavingtogether a tapestry with all these lines, andin that tapestry an image is to form, an im-age of the Divine. But that image is not astatic image. That particularly unfoldingpattern will be one of divine delight andfreedom in which all these threads will notbe statically bound as in a carpet, but willcontinuously flow through each other,uniting, merging, playing, twisting, anduncurling in a movement of constant,growing delight.

If this is the future towards which hu-manity is growing, nature has still onegreat challenge to surmount. Although theentire tapestry is woven around the globe,through some way she must bring thesethreads together and bind them. Perhapsshe concentrates on one small patch of thecarpet. It is a little like what we do in achemistry experiment in which in a liquidwhere sugar is dissolved, one plants onegrain of sugar, around which all the mixedmolecules coalesce to trigger off a reactionthat leads to the granulation of all the sug-ar dissolved in that water. It is as if the di-vine sweetness, now fragmented in chaot-ic lines dispersed all around the world,needs one tiny grain as a catalyst, whichwill spark off so many such crystals of thedivine sweetness. That grain is Auroville.

The ideal of Auroville, the Reality thatit manifests, has been in existence eversince the universe was born. It has waitedthrough many billions of years. Every timethat it seemed as if the ideal might lose itshold on the possibility of manifesting it-self, the Divine has precipitated it uponearth—even when circumstances were notready, simply to keep that ideal alive. You

may know of the Mother’s reference to anattempt in Egypt, which was ahead of itstime, but which was necessary to keep theideal alive. People were drawn to that ideal,and became aligned to it. They had cometogether for that purpose and had to passthrough the pain of its failure.

The Mother observed once that ev-eryone who has come here, be it theAshram or Auroville, has been broughthere because they were promised, longago, that when the time came for the fulfil-ment of the ideal they would be given achance. All of us have been brought here.We do not remember it, but somethingdeep in our hearts knows. When we askourselves why we came to Auroville, weprobably will find no rational reason, orperhaps a chance event, but the event wasonly a trigger to bring forward somethingwhich knew. And even now it is that thingthat knows, that keeps us here, that makesus struggle against the odds. It is thatpromise that the Divine has kept with us.The time has come for that fulfilment. Thewhole of evolution has waited for this mo-ment. The human age is about to dawn.And here in Auroville a nucleus, a seed,has been established.

Why here? Long ago, long beforeeven the idea of Auroville had touched thehuman mind, when the Mother used todrive on what is now the East Coast road,she has on several occasions stopped andstared in this direction. When one of herattendants asked what it was that she wasseeing, she said “One day a huge city willbe established here.” At the time it wasconsidered a strange idea because thiswas desert land, nothing was growing.Why here? She saw it, she didn’t chooseit, she saw it. Because the divine will hadalready chosen this space and prepared itfor centuries.

Recall the Mother’s observation thatall the world’s problems have beenbrought to India because it is in this labo-ratory, where a spiritual culture already ex-ists, that a resolution to the problems ofhumanity has to be found. But if thoseproblems of human nature have beenbrought to India, there is a still greater


problem, on a more external level, which isthe problem of various cultures and na-tionalities. This is more complex than justthe human type. How shall we bring to-gether so many distinct and even oppositecultures in a way that a larger harmony canbe established—a dynamic unfolding har-mony—without letting one culture swal-low another, enabling the distinctivenessof each culture to co-exist and enrich eachother, without dilution? So within India aspecial space had to be chosen: that isAuroville.

But why then? Why not earlier, whynot later? Again we find that there was agreat preparation before Auroville couldbe established. The Sri Aurobindo Ashramwas established first. In that concentratedatmosphere a space was created in theconsciousness where the supramentalconsciousness could descend and committo physical matter. Once the link to the su-permind was established in that concen-trated space and the supramental mani-fested on earth, only then it was possibleto work on Auroville. It still took the Moth-er a decade before that possibility could beorganised in external circumstances. Theright people had to be found to build thecity of the new age, the catalyst, the seedof the sweetness of the future. And the lo-cation had to be found, which had beenprepared over thousands of years.

The new age is not to be built fromexisting forms; it has to be built fromscratch, from its very foundation up. Onlybarren land would do. You have to beginby planting trees, by changing the climate,by bringing the water. With not a singlerupee, you have to gather all from scratch.What will you create, where will peoplelive, what kinds of houses? Nothing of theold is to be working, every step is new onearth, newly perceived, newly created. Thefirst school that was established hereMother named “Last School”—the end ofa mind-set, the beginning of a new line ofdevelopment.

Then the time came for Matrimandir tobe made. You will recall, someone cyclingthrough had a vision of the Matrimandirand reiterated it to the Mother. Thus far

she did not know, but the fact that it wasreceived by a human being was an indica-tion that the time had come for its founda-tion. That thing waiting had managed totouch the mind of a human being. And thework began soon thereafter.

Each individual here represents a fo-cal point of humanity’s aspiration. Andtherefore, every problem one sees here isalso a problem that humanity has to re-solve after it has been resolved here. Soeven if you come with the best of inten-tions, with the clearest of consciousness,the fact that we come for this purposemakes us a representative of humanity.Problems will manifest around us, whetherwe like it or not, because that is preciselythe role Auroville has to play. The prob-lems in Auroville seem to be ever exagger-ated because they must be solved in themost intense conditions. It doesn’t helpwhen the problem is solved when it is notintense. If you look from this perspectiveat the problems in Auroville you may won-der, “Is it worth living in a space where allproblems are going to be in the most ex-

treme?” But that’s the fulfilment, the chal-lenge, the adventure that our souls havechosen. And those very extreme problemscan be resolved here because the base ofthis entire project is the spiritual con-sciousness; it is the supramental con-sciousness of unity.

Yet, in our first efforts, as human be-ings, we have to pass through a few layersin between. So we will try to solve ourproblems by rules and regulations, bycompulsion, by imposition, by conflict,discussion, strategy, and we will have toexhaust those possibilities. We have tocome to a point where we feel “I just can’tsolve it,” and that’s where one will turn tosomething else, to someone else to solveit. As long as I think that I can do it, itdoesn’t work. When I give up and ask forhelp, then I find that, miraculously, the sit-uation will be solved; it will change and re-cast itself. Immediately after that happens,I fall back into my old ways and illusions, Istart believing in myself again. But afterthis kind of thing repeatedly occurs, I learnto attune myself to this inner way and

“The new age is not to be built from existing forms; it has to be built from scratch, from itsvery foundation up. Only barren land would do. You have to begin by planting trees, bychanging the climate, by bringing the water.” (Photo by Nilauro Markus)


when enough of us can be conscious ofthis attunement, then within Auroville thecrystallisation of truth in concrete physi-cal form will take root.

I find new possibilities constantlyemerging in the struggle for the new con-sciousness to gain its grip on matter. It ishappening here. In the light of Auroville’sideals, new homes have to be created. Howdo we relate to each other? How do wegreet each other? How do we relate to Na-ture? How do we organise the layout of thetownship? New forms have to be found. Itis a continual adventure where the Divinedoes not give you a preset form. It is not asif the Divine has a concrete plan, a masterplan which we just have to look at andcopy its features. The truth which is mani-festing in space and time casts itself intoform, and its form changes constantly untilit comes to the point where it can settle. Inthe first shock of that contact there is a re-sistance from matter and the truth has tochange its form, mould itself to the needsand capacity of matter to receive it. If weare conscious instruments and help it tomanifest, it can mould itself more easily. Ifthere is resistance, it needs to draw backand come back with a modified form. Sothere is no form that is pre-set. Our task isto discover the new forms and the seed tounfoldment. A form that was created andtried out ten years ago and partly succeed-ed is not necessarily the same form that isneeded now.

“Auroville is a field”, as Sonia Dynesaid earlier. It is a field in which the concen-tration of that consciousness has beenprojected upon earth. The fact that we livehere, the fact that we struggle here, haveresults; our efforts automatically “rippleout” and affect humanity.

A very interesting experiment that isgoing on is called the “global conscious-ness project,” in which computers aroundthe world are connected to a single com-puter at Princeton. Each of those comput-ers measures the vibration of a single pat-tern, the vibration of the atom, and allthose random pulses are brought togetherin alliance. Each time the vibrations ofthose atoms harmonise, a graph rises, each

time a separation occurs, the graph falls.And it is astonishing to see that wheneverthere is a global event in which the mind ofhumanity connects to a single idea thegraph rises. In the world of football, justwhen someone is about the kick the goal,and the attention of a million people are ona single idea, the graph rises. Or in theworld of the Oscars, when the speaker an-nounces, “and the winner is . . . ” andpauses a moment, the graph rises. Thegraph moves. It was at its highest just afterSeptember 11th. That day gave a shock tothe world, and for a few days it stayed highwhen the world connected, united in itsrevulsion to terrorism. Perhaps after therecent tsunami something like that willhappen, it will be interesting to see.

What is important about this rising ofthe graph is that it represents the harmon-isation of the vibrations of the atoms of theuniverse. It means actually that every atomon earth is somehow vibrating in harmony,that the mind of humanity is united in a sin-gle idea. Matter itself is morphous to ourthoughts, to our collective aspiration. InAuroville, in this special field, that re-sponse of matter is in itself more con-scious. When we unite our aspirations forthe success of this ideal, even matter re-sponds. Every atom here throbs, shares inthat aspiration, and the effect of that radi-ates out into the world.

Mother spoke of Auroville as one ofher steps to manifest the future. Thisproject, the small nucleus that already hasbeen established, is a new beginning. Au-roville is a consciousness, is a revolution.Those of you who live elsewhere in theworld but are part of this consciousnessare also living in Auroville. What you do,the way you live, the way you think, havetheir effects on the world as if you werehere. They have their effects on situationshere, because you are part of the con-sciousness, and for this consciousnessdistance does not matter.

It is this larger identity of Aurovillethat I want to emphasize, because those ofyou who have gone out from here alsohave an effect on the world. Your constantcontact with your inner beliefs in life cre-

ates the kind of communication, commun-ion, by which this consciousness spreadsout to other hearts, other minds. You maynot speak it in so many words, you maynot give out literature, “Here, this is Au-roville, read about it.” But what you aresomehow sprinkles into their hearts andminds like a possibility for them, a new-ness.

During these last few years one cansee the ideal of human unity concretelytaking form on a vast level in the mind ofhumanity. The worldwide response to thetsunami relief is an example of that. Manypeople simply took the first plane to comeand see how they could help. There is nocomparison with that; this never has be-fore happened in human history. We are ata transition period in human history. TheDivine has promised us the chance to bepart of the fulfilment of this ideal. Let uskeep this big picture in mind when over thenext few days we discuss plans, problems,initiatives, strategies. It is not what weplan, what solutions we strategize that willmatter. That is not Auroville. It is the con-sciousness with which we approach theproblem, the consciousness with whichwe stick to the solution. That is Auroville.

We are bound together; it is such athread, this one consciousness. If there’sanything that creates human aspirations, itis this thread around the world, thisboundless communion of consciousnessworldwide. It does not matter if you are notphysically represented here in physicalspace. One does not need to think of it as aritual, and yet, that concretisation of thephysical space ensures the connection ofthe spiritual truth in matter. Every personhere serves the same purpose—connect-ing that ideal with one more link to matter.With each passing event of such focalpoints linked to matter, the ideal of Au-roville establishes itself more strongly onearth. The future comes nearer.

Let us sit for a few minutes, con-sciously aspiring, collectively, that duringthe discussions of the coming days theideal may inspire us with the forms that itseeks.


Chronicles

Inside theSri AurobindoAshram Archives

Editor Larry Seidlitz interviews PeterHeehs, Bob Zwicker, Richard Hartz, Mat-thijs Cornelissen, Ranganath Raghavan,and Raman Reddy of the Sri AurobindoAshram Archives and Research Library,Pondicherry. The interview took place ona hot afternoon in June 2005 around thetable shown at right in the central roomat the Archives office.

The start of the Archives

Collaboration: When did the Ar-chives start?

Peter: We don’t have a foundingdate, but it probably started in 1973. From1971, I and later Shipra and others wereworking under Jayantilal, and that seam-lessly evolved into the Archives. But therewas no Archives when we joined.

Raman: Kiran and Kamal came in 1972.Peter: Right, and then Ashwin came

the next year, I think. Jayantilal was look-ing for people. He had the idea, and heneeded people. He had a good organizingmind.

Collaboration: I am interested in howit developed out of the previous work forthe Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Li-brary (SABCL).

Peter: We were here and doing that,working on the SABCL, and that work hadnot yet finished. There was an office in ex-istence.

Collaboration: But that work musthave taken a long time?

Peter: The printing of the SABCLtook three years, from 1970 to 1972, an ex-traordinary thing, if you think about it. Thewhole Ashram press was doing nothingbut that at the time, and everyone wasproofreading and all. There wasn’t mucheditorial work for the SABCL because they

were just reprinting things that had al-ready appeared. In a few cases they had toput volumes together. For example, TheHarmony of Virtue had to be put together.But the texts were taken straight out ofwherever they had appeared before.

Ranganath: There was no referenceto the manuscripts at that stage.

Peter: There were no manuscriptsavailable, most of them were kept byNolini-da. Actually, the idea of just an ar-chives was what Jayantilal started offwith; it was to preserve the manuscriptsphysically and also photographically.What happened was that Kiran and Kamalwere supposed to do microfilming of SriAurobindo’s documents, and there wasnothing to microfilm at first. Kiran andKamal went up to Delhi to learn about mi-crofilming. Then we went to Nolini for themanuscripts, but he wasn’t so willing togive them. It was Ashwin Barai who said,“We need the stuff, we need the stuff.”Then finally Nolini just started sendingboxes full of manuscripts. The idea wasthat we would prepare them for microfilm-ing. This was probably in 1973.

Then they would come to me, becausewe had to find out what was there andwhat was not, and some sort of numberingand labeling had to be done. Then wefound things that hadn’t been published.So things began to evolve.

In a sense, the Archives editorial workbegan with volume 27 of the SABCL, theSupplement. A few manuscripts had be-gun to come, and people were tearing theirhair out. The Motilal letters had alreadybeen published in an SABCL volume, andthen we got the original letters, which wereabout 100 pages. That had to go in theSupplement because some of the materialhad not been published. The other work ofreceiving manuscripts for preservationpurposes was going on around the sametime, and we realized that there were morethings that needed to be published.

Finally, Jayantilal said we would havea continued supplement, and that was thebirth of the journal, Sri Aurobindo:Archives and Research. That is whyArchives and Research has the samephysical format as the SABCL. Becauseprinting technology was not very ad-

All in white. Seated: Matthijs, Peter, Richard. Standing: Bob, Ranganath, Raman. (Photo byLarry Seidlitz)


vanced then, the idea was that we wouldjust photographically reproduce the pagesin Archives and Research and use themwhen the time came for later editions ofbooks. So that project for the Supplementevolved into the Archives and Research,which subsequently evolved into theComplete Works of Sri Aurobindo whichcurrently is being published. So there is acontinuity there.

Bob: Regarding the founding of theArchives, there is a document we have,dated 25 October 1971, in which Jayantilalwrote to the Mother:

“I have long thought of writing to youthat it has become necessary to make a se-rious and organized effort to collect all themanuscripts of Sri Auro-bindo, make photographiccopies of them, prepare a cat-alogue of all the writings, andfinalize copies which all canrefer to in the future. If this isnot done, many mistakes willbegin to creep in. This pro-cess of deterioration hasalready started, and if it is notchecked, one does not knowwhere it will end.”

Bob: We don’t have anyrecord of whether Mother re-plied to this letter, but itshows what was in Jayanti-lal’s mind. Then he wrote heragain on 15 January 1973:

“Mother, I have oftensuggested that we build up akind of archives where microfilms of all ofSri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s manu-scripts, photoprints of the various edi-tions of their works, and important lettersand documents are preserved. To thismust be attached a library of the books ofSri Aurobindo and the Mother. I wonderwhat the Mother thinks about such aproject.”

Bob: To this request the Mother said,“All right, yes.” We have it in the hand ofthe secretary who took Jayantilal’s letter tothe Mother. It might be taken as the date ofthe founding of the Archives.

But the big thing is this: in the early

1970s a large portion of Sri Aurobindo’smanuscripts came to us. Peter took twoyears to organize them. Then in August1975, he became editor of the Bulletin ofthe Sri Aurobindo International Centre ofEducation, and from that time on—he waseditor for five years—the Bulletin waspacked with new material, especially newwritings from Sri Aurobindo.

Peter: In between, we started the jour-nal Archives and Research, because wewere being called upon by all the Ashramjournals to give this and that new writing,and it was becoming very chaotic. So in1976 we decided to start the new journal,and we started publishing in April 1977. Itwas decided that we would no longer give

material to other journals. And that’s whenour editorial career really began. In eachissue we would do about 100 pages, andthat was done with the specific idea of car-rying on the SABCL.

Richard: I joined in 1980, but at first Iwas working on a Vedic glossary. I haddone some work for Archives and Re-search already when I came on a visit in1978. When I joined in 1980 it was specifi-cally for doing Sanskrit work, and at first Ididn’t do much work in the Archives itself.

Peter: The Vedic glossary was anoth-er project that Jayantilal was pushing for-ward, though it still has not come to frui-

tion. Purani had made a partial glossary,but collecting and compiling all the trans-lations that Sri Aurobindo had done, andfinding the English equivalent of eachSanskrit word, had not been done. So Jay-antilal recruited Richard for that becausethat was another pending project.

Richard: In the end it was good thatthe Vedic glossary didn’t get published atthat time, because it included a lot of mate-rial that only now is going to be published.Since it is based largely on unpublishedmaterials, it makes more sense for it tocome out after we finish publishing all ofSri Aurobindo’s Vedic translations.

The Complete Works

Collaboration: Wouldyou describe the general pro-cess of editing that you wentthrough for publishing theComplete Works?

Peter: First something wasidentified as needing publica-tion—a new letter, or a new es-say, or a version of somethingthat is obviously a later revi-sion of something that hadbeen published. And this wasbased on a very large work ofinventory that had already tak-en many years. The first thingwe did was to go through andidentify the material, and seewhat its relationship was tothings already published and

see whether it was new and ought to bepublished. So that was the first thing: tofind something that needed to be pub-lished.

Historically speaking, what generallywould happen is that we would first pre-pare it for publication in the Archives andResearch journal. So it meant typing acopy of it, in those days on a typewriter,and checking it, and checking it, andchecking it. That is actually what we do,we check. There are a few people who tran-scribe directly from the manuscript, somepeople who are very good at this. SueCrothers, an Australian, is perhaps the

Raman and Ranganath checking the text of the Vedic Studies.(Photo by Larry Seidlitz)


best. Then the thing would be on paper.And then it is just a matter of reading itover and over again.

Richard: We have this system of oneperson reading to another, that is, readingthe manuscript to the person who is hold-ing the transcript in order to check thetranscript.

Collaboration: So this is for the pub-lications that came out in Archives and Re-search?

Peter: Historically, most of it came outin Archives and Research before it wentinto the Complete Works. But it is a typicalcase of how things that had not yet beenpublished ended up in printed form.

Collaboration: But what about forsomething like The Synthesis of Yoga orThe Life Divine?

Peter: Then it is kind of similar in thatyou still have to identify what is the mostreliable version or combination of versionsto use for this particular text, with Sri Au-robindo’s latest revision. So, again, thereis an identification of the correct manu-script or printed edition to follow.

Richard: Work on the major bookswas actually started with scanned texts.

Peter: In other words, we didn’t haveto type them. By this time we had comput-ers. Instead of reading from the base text toa typed copy, we’ll read to a computerprint-out that had been produced throughscanning.

That is just verification of the accura-cy of our new copy. Simultaneously, we arelooking and seeing whether everything isthe way it should be. For that you have touse your judgment. That is where you getinto the very difficult part of editing.

Richard: Actually we don’t do whatmost people think of as “editing.” We areonly concerned with establishing the au-thentic text and we don’t try to improve onwhat Sri Aurobindo wrote. We get into dif-ficult situations, though. Sometimes wedon’t have anything to read against exceptthe Arya, for example. So if there seems tobe a misprint in the Arya, there is no manu-script to check for the correct reading. TheSecret of the Veda, for example, was justprinted in the Arya and that’s that. For The

Synthesis of Yoga, part of it is like that,Parts Three and Four are straight from theArya, but other parts Sri Aurobindo re-vised very extensively and rewrote. Part ofthat was published during his own lifetime.So each text has its own history. But ifthere is a manuscript written by Sri Auro-bindo in his own hand, then we generallyread from that, taking into account the laterstages in which he revised the typescriptof it.

Collaboration: So it is not the casethat for everything there is a written manu-script?

Richard: There is not always a manu-script, no. There are many books for whichthe beginning of the text is the Arya, butthen many of the works published in theArya were revised by Sri Aurobindo onpages torn out of the Arya. And so we readagainst the revised Arya.

Peter: It often means that there is notone single set of papers that is the manu-script for a given book. For part of it wehave to rely on one source and for anotherpart we have to rely on something else.When Sri Aurobindo revised somethingand didn’t see it all the way through toprint, sometimes problems arise. In a sim-ple case he might not have put a period atthe end of a sentence. Editorially, you haveto put the period at the end of a sentence,but that’s already an editorial decision.

Richard: Even if he did see it all theway through to print there is the problemof what to do if we discover that the veryfirst typescript that he revised alreadycontained a mistyping of what he had writ-ten in his original manuscript. Then wehave to decide whether to go back to themanuscript or accept whatever was incor-porated in the revised version eventhough it began as a transmission error.

Peter: This has been explained insomething like a hundred pages in Ar-chives and Research where we talk aboutvarious editorial difficulties. But essential-ly it is a matter of confirming the text byhaving the material on one side, having atranscript on the other, and confirming thetext of the transcript. Nowadays we checka laser print that has been produced

through scanning the best available ver-sion of the text. So it is kind of a straight-forward thing, we just check text A againsttext B; but there are a multitude of difficul-ties and complexities that can enter in.

Collaboration: Can you give a timelinefor completion of the Complete Works?

Peter: Everyone is smiling because itis difficult to do.

Matthijs: There is a sliding timeline.Peter: We would have liked there to

be no timeline at all, and those of us whowere involved in editing knew that it wouldstretch out. On the other hand, Jayantilalwanted the whole Complete Works done inthree years! And so that three years hasgradually stretched out. There is a kind oftension between the need that we all rec-ognize of getting the thing done— theneeds of the press, the needs of the dis-tributors, the demands of the readers tohave their final product—and then our rec-ognition that a great deal of work is neededfor any text.

Richard: In fact, the whole differencebetween this edition and the SABCL is dueto the fact that we are taking a lot moretime.

Bob: Our general situation is this. Westarted the Complete Works in 1997. It isnow eight years later. We have put 25books into the press. We have a dozenmore to go, and we have done a lot of workon almost all of them. Whereas in theSABCL there was one volume On Himself,there will now be two volumes: Letters onHimself and the Ashram and Autobio-graphical Notes and Writings of Histori-cal Interest. One volume of that is amongthe next things coming. Collected Poemswill also come soon because we have readmost of the poems twice and they needjust a finalization. Then the book TheMother with Letters on the Mother willcome. Then the four Letters on Yoga vol-umes will come; there won’t just be threevolumes, there will be four, and they are sopacked that each volume will run to 700 or800 pages. Then will come Hymns to theMystic Fire and Vedic Studies with Writ-ings on Philology.

Collaboration: Will the latter works


be substantially enlarged?Peter: Whereas before there were two

volumes, Secret of the Veda and Hymns tothe Mystic Fire, now we have three. Secretof the Veda is made up entirely of thingsthat were published by Sri Aurobindo inthe Arya, and the new edition is prettymuch like the old one. That has been outfor some time. Hymns to the Mystic Firewas partly published by Sri Aurobindoand partly not. What identifies it is that thehymns in that book are addressed to Agni.We also have a lot of other Vedic materialthat needs to be published. That wouldhave properly gone into one volume thatwe are going to call Vedic Studies, but itjust became too big. It would have beenover a 1000 pages. So we are reducing thesize of it by putting anything from SriAurobindo’s notebooks that has to dowith Agni in with the other material inHymns to the Mystic Fire.

Bob: So we have a dozen volumes togo. It is 2005. Sri Aurobindo enters thepublic domain in 2010. After that point,anyone can use his works the way theywant to. By 2010 we would like to haveeverything wrapped up, so that when SriAurobindo does go into the public do-main, it is all accurate, orderly, and as com-plete as possible.

Peter: He doesn’t go completely intothe public domain. For anything that waspublished after his passing, it would be 60years from that point, and not from 1950.That is how I understand it. But anyhow,yes, we want to get it finished.

Bob: So we hope to wrap it up in fiveyears. We should be able to do that.

Richard: We certainly will have 35volumes out, which is what we promisedpeople. There may be a couple of volumesstill to go.

Peter: We had to add two volumes towhat we originally thought—a volume ofletters on yoga and a volume of material onhimself and the Ashram.

Behind the scenes

Collaboration: Do you have enoughpeople and resources in the Archives?

Peter: In a way we have a kind of bal-ance now, because things are going for-ward on different books at differentspeeds and in different ways. So maybe wecould use more people for proofreading,but then someone here would have to pro-duce something to feed them text to proof-read, and that person is busy with some-thing else. It is not like having huge num-bers of people doing one thing.

Richard: And most aspects of thework take a lot of experience. You can’t justbring in anybody new.

Bob: The truth is that the general or-ganization and final editing of all the vol-umes is done by our two main editors, Pe-ter Heehs and Richard Hartz. They areboth superb organizers, readers, and edi-tors. The work of the rest of us is largely tosupport them, give them time to work, andassist them in every way we can. And they,in turn, put on us every responsibility theycan, realizing that they only have a certainamount of time.

Peter: That makes it too “editor-cen-tric.” The one factor you haven’t broughtinto this is the technical side. I said that westarted with typed sheets and ink, and nowwe have scanners and computers. WhenMatthijs came in 1992, we really didn’thave a computer program or an idea abouthow we were going to handle all the elec-tronic text that we were producing. Withhis experience in this sort of thing, he wasable not only to set up the particular pro-gram that we were going to use, but also tofit it in into the whole publishing programthat the press had.

Bob: When a book goes to theAshram Press for publication, it has beennot just edited here and proofread, butalso completely laid out down to where thehyphens appear on the page.

Matthijs: I’ve mainly been contribut-ing to the typesetting of the book, and try-ing to keep all the editorial information aspart of the texts. So we have a program thatallows us to keep all the editorial history inthe text without it affecting the final type-set pages that go to the press. So it will allbe there, even though it doesn’t print.

Richard: That is one of the big differ-

ences between this edition and any previ-ous edition. For previous editions, all wehave is what was printed; we can onlyguess how it came about. Whereas in thisedition, we have a record of how every-thing happened and it is all there in com-puter files.

Peter: As well as on all the paper thatwe have produced; we are saving a hugecollection with the various stages of oureditorial work.

Matthijs: For most books that go tothe press, we have about five versionshere, with all our notations in the margins.And the file format is plain text, so it willalso be readable after 20 years when allthese programs are not available any more.If you do everything in Microsoft Word,after 10 years you are lost. But these arevery simple text files.

Peter: To get away again from the ed-itorial-star approach, I may mention that toidentify the proper text takes an enormousamount of inventory work and study thatis done beforehand. The best example ofthat is the Letters. Raman has done a lot ofwork over the years to organize the Let-ters, and it is a very vital thing, but the kindof thing that doesn’t attract anybody’s at-tention.

Now when we go to a letter, say a let-ter written on 3 July 1936, we have a recordcontaining every version of the letter, ev-ery handwritten copy, typewritten copy,and printed version of that letter. And may-be there was a letter that was written by SriAurobindo and revised for one purposeand then revised by him for another pur-pose. All those things have been broughttogether from various sources—from soand so’s manuscripts, from typed copiesover here, and the proofs of a book overthere. All of this material has been broughttogether through years of work. There areat least 6000 letters.

Raman: There are 5966. (Laughter)Bob: When Peter takes a decision to-

day, persons like Raman have been work-ing for 25 years to prepare the background.

Raman: It is not only me, there havebeen so many people like me working asstorekeepers, organizers, arrangers. I have


personally worked on this data-base of letters since the veryfirst day I came here in 1976. Iwas looking for work and Petersaid, “Give him the letters.” Sohe gave me the letters, and Ididn’t even know what it meant.(Laughter)

So you had to try find theoriginal letters that went intothe many volumes of Sri Auro-bindo’s printed letters. TheCentenary Edition had beenpublished. There were five orsix volumes, and you had tofind the original letter. It was re-ally difficult to find. You eitherhad to read the entire thing andkeep it in memory or you had tohave a practical arrangement.

So the first thing that came to mindwas to make a card index. I wrote on plainchit pads the first line of every letter. I had6000 cards and I put them in alphabeticalorder. It became a kind of finding game.Then gradually the cards got typed, so wehad a typed index. Then we put it on thecomputer. I learned the elements of data-base and created a plain database pro-gram. It worked, and then in time this data-base became more and more sophisticated,and we eventually got control over all thedata.

Now, in this database we have the firstline of every letter, its date, and the sourceof that date—how we know it was thatdate. It will refer to a certain manuscript (ifwe have it), to the person to whom the let-ter was written, whether there are earlytyped copies of it, where it is published,and other things. With this information thedatabase becomes a very powerful tool,able to do anything. Now we can playabout with this database and we will beable to produce a whole new reedited edi-tion of Letters.

Peter: The database contains any-thing that might be of interest when we aretrying to finalize the text. There are cross-references if a letter has been published inmore than one volume—often they wereduplicated—and of course, mention of

where the letter is in the SABCL and whereit will be in the Complete Works.

Raman: There are often several manu-scripts of a single letter. So all these had tobe collated together.

Matthijs: For each of the 6000 letters,there is a folder which contains a copy ofall the manuscripts related to that oneletter.

Peter: Now it takes only a tenth of asecond to bring up the record on that let-ter. But to produce that took 20 years or soto go through all the hundreds of boxes,and say, “Ah, this is a version of A1,” andthen put it in the computer and have itavailable. So now this is on our computersand any of us can consult it. It would beabsolutely impossible to do work on theseletters without this information. Actually,this is a database of all our holdings, notjust things related to manuscripts.

Raman: It is an inventory of the Ar-chives. There are about 10,000 items in theArchives. When Matthijs came, he wentthrough all the items, listed them, anddumped them into one big database. Nowwe have access to every item. We know atonce whether Moni Chakravarty has sixboxes or five boxes, where they are, andwhat sort of material, whether it is primarymaterial kept in the cold storage, or sec-ondary material stored elsewhere.

Matthijs: There wereothers who contributed tothat database before me.

Sri Aurobindo’s corre-spondence

Collaboration: How dothe letters in this edition ofthe Complete Works differfrom those in previous edi-tions—in terms of publishingmore letters, or publishingmore of the questions?

Raman: Each letter hasbeen checked against themanuscripts.

Bob: There will be about25 to 30 percent new letters,and with the old ones, we are

checking each letter to make sure it is accu-rate. And sometimes we are including por-tions that had been left out previously. Asfor questions, they will go in some vol-umes and not in others. In the four Letterson Yoga volumes we won’t have ques-tions, but in the volume The Mother withLetters on the Mother, for example, therewill be questions. Also in the two volumescontaining letters of Sri Aurobindo on him-self there will be questions. In the Letterson Poetry and Art, which is about 750 pag-es long, certain sections have questions.

Collaboration: Have there been sys-tematic attempts to solicit letters?

Peter: Routinely, people have giventheir letters to the Ashram authorities andthen they have come to us. I don’t knowthat any advertisement had to be done.

Bob: We have put notices on the bul-letin board in the Ashram, but it hasn’tbrought us much. It is more often the casethat when people pass away the trusteessend their manuscripts to us, or when peo-ple know that our work is good, they vol-untarily come and say, “Here are my let-ters.” Madhav Pandit did that, for example,he brought his whole collection of letters.

Peter: This is a major portion of whatwe have. Many things either came fromNolini or from Madhav Pandit. Nolini-dagave all his papers, all his letters, all his

Peter working at his desk in the Archives office. (Photo by LarrySeidlitz)


manuscripts. Madhav Pandit entrusted hiscollection to Jayantilal and the team hebuilt up.

Collaboration: Do you think thereare a lot of letters out there that still thathave not been collected?

Bob: I don’t think there are a lot, no.Peter: For the major correspondents,

who were just a dozen or so, their materialis with us. A lot of letters never left theAshram, because if it went outside, whatSri Aurobindo wrote by hand would re-main with Nolini, and only a typed copywent out. So all those things were withNolini. And there were no great losses, Ithink, because they were treated as some-thing sacred.

Raman: For some correspondences,we do not have the correspondent’s ques-tions—the questions were destroyed bythe person after receiving Sri Aurobindo’sreplies.

Peter: There are a number of corre-spondences where all we have is signa-tures, or “yes,” “no,” because peoplewould cut that out from the letter, whichthey then destroyed.

Collaboration: Is there more corre-spondence on literature and poetry andthings like that that you have collected?

Bob: Yes. In the SABCL, the letters onpoetry came out in four different volumes:some in On Himself, some in the back ofThe Future Poetry, the Savitri letters in theback of Savitri, and some letters in theSupplement. We brought them all togetherand added many new letters in the volumecalled Letters on Poetry and Art.

Some of the great collections of lettershad been fragmented, like the letters toAmal Kiran. So although this book is orga-nized by subject, there also has been aneffort to keep the sadhaks’ letters togetherwithin the subject. This book came outabout two years ago and was organized byPeter.

The Record of Yoga

Collaboration: Can you tell us aboutthe Record of Yoga? I would be interestedin hearing about the history of that.

Peter: I’ll do the early history, then Ri-chard can take it up. The notebooks inwhich the Record is contained includeabout 30 that are primarily or only Recordmaterial, and portions of other notebooks.These came along with all the other note-books from Nolini in the mid-1970s. Thiswas the main discovery when we were go-ing through those notebooks. There hadbeen rumors about this material, but noone really knew if it existed. They didn’tknow there were almost 1500 pages of ma-terial. Finally, when the inventory of thenotebooks was done, a certain numberwere set aside as being only or primarilyRecord notebooks. They were numberedand put aside as being a different categoryof things. Then a typed transcript wasmade, just because we wondered what wasthere. There was some question aboutwhether it ought to be published at all. SriAurobindo certainly didn’t write it for pub-lication. On the other hand, there wereplenty of things he didn’t write for publica-tion that had been published. That in-cludes drafts of essays that never gotworked up.

Collaboration: Who made the deci-sion?

Peter: We wanted to publish it our-selves. We thought this was great stuff.But we had to ask Jayantilal what hethought about the idea. A characteristic ofJayantilal that was remarkable is that hewould never push anything. He would sortof suggest. He knew everyone in theAshram, he was well-respected. He wouldjust kind of say, “Well, this seems like thismight be a good thing to do.” I sometimescontrast it to Satprem’s approach with theAgenda, which is that you take it and ram-bash and push it through, and damn whatanybody thinks. Jayantilal just very slow-ly brought the idea forward. I think hemight have published one or two pieces ofit and nobody seemed to object. He talkedabout the project to Nolini who wouldmake the decision, and also to other peo-ple who might conceivably have opposedit. He prepared the groundwork. It wasn’tuntil 1986 that we began to bring out littlepieces of the Record in Archives and Re-

search. At first we would select from a giv-en period things that seemed interesting.And this was a time at which anyone whohad objections could object, but no onedid. And Jayantilal said, “Well, it seems allright. We can’t really say that Sri Auro-bindo didn’t want it to be published alongwith all his other unpublished material.” Sowe went ahead, and finally, without toomuch outcry, we got to the end of it, in agood nine years.

Collaboration: Was it a fairlystraightforward project in terms of gather-ing the material and putting it in chrono-logical order?

Peter: Fortunately, there were two as-pects that made it easier than some things.First, it was all dated, or largely dated. Andthe undated pieces, with only a little work,could be fitted in with the dated ones. Sec-ond, there is only one version. He hardlyrewrote anything. So it was just a matter ofreading it. Of course, there are difficult por-tions—we are talking now just about read-ing the words on the page. Actually, hewrote rather slowly, so that the words arepretty well-formed. So producing a tran-script wasn’t all that difficult on the whole.

It was prepared for publication in theway we did everything: making a typedcopy, checking that, rechecking, getting itprinted in Archives and Research. We nowhad 1500 pages in print. Most of this wasbeing done by Richard; for a while thatwas his primary job in the Archives be-sides Savitri, to produce the two install-ments of the Record of Yoga that wouldcome out every year. By the end of 1994 ithad all pretty much come out. More materi-al was added mainly near the beginningand the end when it was published as twovolumes of the Complete Works in 2001.

Collaboration: I would like to askabout the substantive contents of theRecord. Are there important elements ofthe Integral Yoga that are described onlythere and not in The Synthesis of Yoga orthe Letters on Yoga? Are there some im-portant elements of the yoga for which onehas to go to the Record?

Richard: It depends upon how muchyou want to know. There are certain as-


pects which Sri Aurobindo discussed in ageneral way in the Synthesis, about whichthere is much more detail in the Record.Also, there is the fact that he did not com-plete Part Four of The Synthesis of Yoga,“The Yoga of Self-Perfection,” which is thepart that corresponds most closely to theRecord. He explains a lot of the terminolo-gy of the Record in the portion of Part Fourof the Synthesis that he did complete. Forthe topics that were to be covered in theunfinished remainder of the Synthesis, insome cases all we have is the Record,where, because he was only writing forhimself, he didn’t really explain somethings. We know, for exam-ple, that he was experiencingfive different kinds of physi-cal ananda, which he hardlytalks about elsewhere. Thereare other aspects of thesadhana that he was record-ing in the Record, which hedidn’t write about anywhereelse in such detail, but theseare mostly quite advancedand probably not of muchpractical importance for mostof us.

Peter: I see it as differentforms of presentation of hisexperience and his concep-tion of the thing. In theRecord he was writing forhimself, just straightforward-ly, what he had experiencedthat day. In the Synthesis it was a publicknowledge that he was creating. And thenin the Letters he was writing to his disci-ples. So if you look at these three presenta-tions, they are all quite different in a way,but of course they are all based on thesame body of experience.

Richard: One of the most interestingthings is to put these side by side. We seehow what he was writing in the Synthesisand even The Life Divine, which some-times sounds rather abstract, correspondsto concrete, day-to-day experiences.

Collaboration: Can you tell us whatwas left unfinished in The Synthesis ofYoga that he wrote about in the Record?

Richard: In the last part of the Syn-thesis, “The Yoga of Self-Perfection,” SriAurobindo started to go very systemati-cally through what he called the saptachatusthaya, although he didn’t call it thatin the Synthesis. For his own purposes hewas calling it the sapta chatusthaya, theseven tetrads. These formed the struc-ture—he called it the program—of hissadhana, which he received soon after hecame to Pondicherry. “The Yoga of Self-Perfection” starts off with the last of theseven chatusthayas, the siddhi chatust-haya. There are chapters on shuddhi andmukti, that is, purification and liberation,

and a general explanation of what he meantby siddhi, integral perfection. He more orless skipped over bhukti, liberated enjoy-ment, which in the Record is the third mem-ber of the siddhi chatusthaya, but in theSynthesis is listed last and he may have in-tended to come back to it at the very end.Then there is a chapter called “The Ele-ments of Perfection,” in which he summa-rizes the first six chatusthayas. He doesn’tuse the word chatusthaya, but it is veryclear, because he talks in several placesabout the four elements of each chatust-haya. Then he takes them up systematical-ly, and he gets to the second member of thethird chatusthaya, the vijnana chatus-

thaya. The second member of that istrikaladrishti, the triple-time-vision—meaning the knowledge of the past,present, and future. And that is where theArya stopped. That means that he was lessthan half way through, or about half waysince he had already talked about the lastchatusthaya.

Reference material

Collaboration: One of the tasks ofthe Archives, as I understood from thebackground reading you gave me, wasgathering biographical information on Sri

Aurobindo, some of which wasdone for the SABCL.

Peter: As far as the SABCLwent, it was Jayantilal who sug-gested that we have at least achronology of Sri Aurobindo’slife to be published with the in-dex and glossary in volume 30just as basic information. Forthat, someone got some materialfrom Delhi at the National Ar-chives, and Jayantilal encour-aged me to get material from oth-er Archives. I did a lot of thatsort of work in the 1970s and1980s. It is not, strictly speak-ing, one of the main projects ofthe Archives.

Collaboration: Is theremore of that kind of material inthis edition?

Peter: Actually, we are letting SriAurobindo speak for himself, because oneof the volumes is going to be called Auto-biographical Notes with Writings of His-torical Interest. That corresponds to a cer-tain type of material that was published inOn Himself, part of which was a collectionof biographical documents. So more bio-graphical material is coming out, gatheredfrom different places. Also, letters of the1930s in which Sri Aurobindo referred inpassing to himself, some of which had alsoappeared in On Himself, are coming out inanother volume called Letters on Himselfand the Ashram. So that is part of the workwith the letters—to isolate those letters on

An urgent meeting of some key Archives personnel. The personseated in front with has his back to the camera is Mr. Pattegar, one ofthe administrative heads. (Photo by Larry Seidlitz)


Sri Aurobindo and the Ashram and bringthem together.

I don’t know that we have any plansto do much in the way of biography in thereference volumes of the Complete Works.Inherently, writing a biography is interpre-tive, and I have personally taken on thatwork, which I do apart from the Archiveswork. Collecting materials is another thing.Something that I would like to publish is aseries called “Documents in the Life of SriAurobindo.” Much of it has already ap-peared in Archives and Research, whichhas about 150 pages of straight historicaldocuments. A project to be taken up is tocomplete that, to print the raw data withoutany historical interpretation, just as theycame, and leave it for the reader to makeuse of. That is something we will do in thesomewhat distant future.

Collaboration: Regarding referencematerial, I understand that there is going tobe some reference work pertaining to theRecord of Yoga?

Richard: Yes, there will be a fairly ex-tensive glossary. No other volume of theComplete Works will have its own glossa-ry, but the Record poses unusual prob-lems for readers. Peter had already done alot of work on the technical terminology ofthe Record before I joined the Archives.Then when we began to publish it seriallyin Archives and Research, I took over thejob of preparing for each issue a glossarydefining the Sanskrit terms that occurredin that installment. The definitions in thoseglossaries were just the minimum that wasnecessary to have some idea of what thewords meant. When the Record finallycame out in two volumes, ideally thereshould have been a glossary along with it,but we didn’t want to delay publicationuntil the glossary was ready. So as soon asthose two volumes were published, I start-ed working on the glossary (besides myother work). At first the idea was essential-ly to combine the glossaries that had ap-peared in Archives and Research and addsome definitions of terms occurring in newmaterial that had been included. But grad-ually the scope of it has expanded and Ihave started going into more depth. Now

some of the definitions of the most com-plex terms come to almost half a page. Andthere are between two and three thousandterms, including compound expressionswhich sometimes need to be defined apartfrom the separate words they are com-posed of.

Peter: We should also explain thatthere are two parts to the glossary.

Richard: Besides the glossary proper,there will be an outline of the terminologyof the Record of Yoga. Peter had alreadyprepared something he called a StructuralOutline, and I took that up and elaboratedon it. It is an outline of a few hundred of theimportant terms based on the structure ofthe sapta chatusthaya. One can gothrough it and familiarize oneself with theterminology, before trying to grapple withthe Record itself. Or it can be used in con-junction with the alphabetical glossary,which refers to the outline by the numbersof the items. The problem with a glossaryis that you can’t read through it, becausethere is no meaningful sequence; you canonly look up individual words. With theoutline, you can glance through it and seethe relations of the different terms for anyaspect of the yoga you are particularly in-terested in. Then if you want to go into itmore deeply you can find the terms in theglossary.

Peter: The outline follows Sri Auro-bindo’s own structure.

Richard: Yes. We have simply filled inthat structure with related terms so that ithas become more detailed. But he himselflaid out the seven chatusthayas and theirmembers—the elements of the Yoga ofSelf-Perfection as he called it in the Syn-thesis—in a kind of outline form.

Collaboration: The glossary will be avolume of the Complete Works?

Richard: It will be part of the set, yes,but it won’t be numbered as a volume.

Peter: It will be an appendix as it were,so it can sit on the shelf next to the Recordof Yoga. It will be sold separately also, sothat people who have bought the Recordof Yoga separately can obtain it.

Richard: The fact that it will be part ofthe Complete Works is one reason I don’t

want to rush it. Once it is done it will bethere for all time. I feel that it should bedone as well as possible.

Collaboration: What is the timelinefor getting it out?

Richard: Recently a problem hascome up with regard to the publication ofthe glossary, in addition to the fact that it istaking longer than expected and is delay-ing other work. Many quotations from SriAurobindo’s writings occur in the defini-tions—I try to use his own words as muchas possible because it is the only way tobridge the gap between his consciousnessand ours. Some of the writings quotedhave not yet been published in the Com-plete Works. In order to give proper refer-ences, those volumes should be publishedbefore the glossary which contains quota-tions from them. So at a meeting with thePublication Department it has been decid-ed to give priority to completing the regu-lar volumes of the Complete Works. Theglossary to the Record will be brought outalong with other reference material at theend. Meanwhile it has been proposed thata simpler glossary could be put on theAshram’s website for those who cannotread the Record without a glossary. TheAshram doesn’t want to print and publishsomething that is only a stopgap, but put-ting it on the Internet would be a tempo-rary solution until the definitive glossaryis available. This possibility has just beensuggested and is being considered.

Perceptions of the Archives

Peter: There is something that is in-teresting to me that I would like to discuss.Ranganath has been in the Ashram a longtime, he has been here since he was a child.He saw the Archives taking shape, butjoined it only recently. At first the Archiveswasn’t much in view and now it seemssometimes too much in view. Ranganath,as someone who has seen developmentsin the Ashram over a long period of time,how does the Archives appear to peopleoutside the department?

Ranganath: I think the Archives isdoing a very important job. For one thing,


there were imperfections in the printedbooks, mistakes you can call them, so allthat is now being corrected. We are tryingto produce an accurate edition for the fu-ture so that this work doesn’t have to beredone. I think that there is a recognition inthe Ashram that the Archives is doing animportant work.

Peter: For a while, back in the earlydays when Jayantilal was here, nobodyknew that anything was going on here.

Ranganath: Nobody knew the detailsof what was being done. I was working atthe press, but even I did not know so manyprojects were going on.

Peter: Did it seem strangethat some relative newcomershad come along and were givenwork like this?

Ranganath: In certainquarters there may have beenthat feeling, it may be thereeven now. But overall, I thinkthat the perception is good.

Bob: When the Recordcame out, did you hear anycomments like, “Oh, how couldthey publish it?”

Ranganath: Yes, that, ofcourse, because, as you rightlyasked, “Who took the deci-sion?” There was some ques-tion of whether it should bepublished at all or not. I person-ally feel that a principle of keep-ing private what Sri Aurobindowrote, which was not intended for publicviewing, would have had a relevance whenhe was in his body. That is how I see it.Now when you see the texts, it could help alot of people. So how could it not be pub-lished? And that is what Jayantilal told me.I asked him, “How did you get the permis-sion to publish this?” He said, “How canwe not publish it? How can it remain hid-den forever? At some point in time it has tocome out.” And I think I agree with that. Infact, I was very happy that it was pub-lished, because I got to go through thewhole thing and enjoyed it very much.There are a lot of things that are just so in-teresting.

Generally, there is a recognition herethat the Archives is doing good work.There are pockets of resistance here andthere, which are largely, I think, ignorant,ill-informed, but that also slowly is chang-ing. There have even been court cases andall that. But I think the Archives has takenthat very well in its stride.

Collaboration: Are the court casesan ongoing problem?

Peter: We don’t really feel it thatmuch. Richard, if he is called upon, has toexplain one thing or another, for some rea-son or another.

Richard: At one point it was taking up

quite a bit of my time and slowing downour work. Actually the legal harassmenthas been by fundamentalists outside theAshram, though it stirred up controversyin the Ashram too. Most of it has been di-rected against the 1993 edition of Savitri,whose text was finally decided not by theArchives but by Nirodbaran and Amal Ki-ran, just like previous editions.

Peter: Basically we do our work justlike we have done from the 1970s. We werefirst shielded by Jayantilal, and even nowafter his passing the trustees are 100 per-cent behind us. They have wanted toknow what is going on, but they have nev-er taken a hostile or prosecutorial attitude

towards us.Ranganath: That is because it is gen-

erally recognized that whatever is beingdone is very legitimate, and there is notampering with the texts. There was thismisunderstanding: some people thoughtthat now it is not Sri Aurobindo, but whatsomebody else has substituted. But thatidea was very ignorant and ill-informed.

Bob: Yes. Our main work at the Ar-chives is to remove any mistakes acciden-tally made by people while transcribingand publishing Sri Aurobindo’s works inthe past. We simply restore what SriAurobindo actually wrote.

When Jayantilal passedaway, Manoj-da came for-ward and took his place.Manoj-da is a respected mem-ber of the community whotrusted and appreciated ourwork. He wanted to be in-formed of all that we were do-ing, and we invited him andthe other trustees, regularly,for briefings on what we weredoing. Especially Manoj-daand Dr. Dutta showed real in-terest. We would sit here atthis same table and spend awhole afternoon together. Pe-ter and Richard would makepresentations, show themanuscripts, explain what wedo. They appreciated that wewere open with them. We

have always had their support. It hasn’tbeen easy for them to support us whenthere was misunderstanding and opposi-tion, but they have always given us fullsupport—moral support, legal support,and financial support. It is a very beautifulthing to have the support of your respect-ed elders.

Peter: I think that generally peoplethink that the Archives is doing a goodjob. Most people in the Ashram aren’tbusy-body types. As long as there is ageneral feeling that we are members of theAshram, are doing our work, and we aresupported by the authorities, they let usgo about our business, for the most part.

Shanta, one of many behind-the-scene workers at the Archives,works on the volume of Vedic Studies. (Photo by Larry Seidlitz)


There is a vocal minority, of course,and vocal minorities tend to getheard.

Raman: I think it is the generalatmosphere of the Ashram that is re-sponsible for everything that goeswell here. We don’t realize that wehave a special environment of theAshram. In the Ashram you have theArchives, which is not different, ba-sically, from the other departments.It gets a protection. And it is theMother who is running it. Maybe Iam being a little sentimental andemotional, but basically it is that. Ev-erybody is working for the Mother.That is something concrete. If you takethat element out, we will just fall apart. Ihave seen other centers where this feelingis not strong, and they just fall apart. Andthis is very concrete. It is fine to say I amworking for the Mother and all that, just tosay it, but to feel it and do it is different.

Peter: No one here feels that he or sheis working under somebody else. We reallydon’t have a head of the department in thatway. Legally, Manoj, the Managing Trust-ee, is the head.

Richard: I don’t think there is anotherdepartment that is so decentralized.

Peter: We have Bob and Mr. Pattegaras administrative heads. Some people givework to other people, but nobody has thesense that they are working for another.

Bob: That is one of Jayantilal’s greatcontributions. He gave us freedom andsupport and encouragement.

Peter: And then he just let things de-velop, so that before he passed away in1999, we had 25 years of just doing whatwe were doing, with his encouragementand behind-the-scenes direction. So thething had developed as a kind of self-start-ing proposition, and continued that way.

Bob: Jayantilal decided to start pub-lishing the Complete Works in 1997. Wethought, give us a little more time, let usdevelop a larger body of books so thatwhen we begin we will have more materialready. I thought, and a few others thought,that 2000 would be a good starting date forpublication, with the new millennium and

all that. He wanted to start right away. Westarted in 1997, Sri Aurobindo’s 125th birth-day. Jayantilal passed away in 1999. Bythen, things were well under way. Up untilthen, it was he who protected us and de-fended us. And soon after he passed away,there was criticism of our editorial methodsand even court cases against our work.Yet, by then, things were so well underwaythat there was no going back. If we hadwaited until 2000 and there had been manyobjections against our editorial methodsor what we planned to do, the projectmight not even have gotten off theground. Jayantilal got the thing going in1997; now we will continue our work andcomplete it.

Matthijs: It needs to be mentionedthat all those court cases fall flat becauseour methods are so meticulous. The wholeediting process is one of sticking strictlyto what Sri Aurobindo wrote himself. Weare not doing fancy work. And finally itgoes smoothly because our work is solidand transparent and we keep detailedrecords of all the things we do.

Peter: We can’t be criticized for tryingto pull something over on anybody be-cause we are perfectly clear about what weare doing. We have written hundreds ofpages in Archives and Research and else-where explaining everything about our ed-itorial method, and now we write thesenotes in the back of every book tellingwhat is going on. So it is not as if there is amysterious little cabal producing things

and not being accountable to any-body. We feel we are accountable toeverybody, in fact. On the otherhand, we have to do our work too.

Matthijs: It doesn’t go in anyway against what has been saidabout the Mother’s protection, andthat everybody is basically workingfor the Mother. But the work is alsosolid in its own way.

Preservation of manuscripts

Collaboration: Would you de-scribe the present state of Sri Aurob-indo’s manuscripts with regard to

their preservation?Matthijs: I think we do what is techni-

cally state-of-the-art at the moment. Thisclimate is the worst you can have, and sothe manuscripts are now stored in a placewhere they are kept as well as anybodycould keep them. They are kept at a totallyregulated temperature and humidity.

Peter: They are kept in a place thatMatthijs helped to deign with a custom-made air conditioning and dehumidifyingsystem, and it is very impressive.

Matthijs: It is interesting in that thetrustees gave us their meeting room forstoring the manuscripts, which by itself isvery sweet; they are kept in the old roomwhere the trustees used to meet.

Collaboration: How do the manu-scripts look now? What condition is thepaper and the ink in?

Matthijs: They deteriorated quite a bitin the early years. Many of the pages fromthe Arya, for example, are completely brit-tle. With the loose editions of the Aryawhich are kept outside, you cannot turnthe pages without breaking them. But theones that have been kept in cold storageare in better condition. That is impressive.For every five degrees that you bring thetemperature down, the life of the paperdoubles, more or less. If you bring the tem-perature down from 35 to say 20 Celsius,then the life becomes eight times as long.So that is a considerable improvement.

Collaboration: Are all the handwrit-ten manuscripts in the cold storage?

The Mother resided for a time in the back of the presentArchives, where Bob now stays. (Photo by Larry Seidlitz)


Matthijs: All the handwritten manu-scripts of Sri Aurobindo are in the coldstorage and kept in acid-free handmade-paper folders. The main enemy of paper isthe acidity in the paper itself, so if youkeep them protected from each other, inter-leaved with acid-free paper, they last longer.

Peter: Incidentally, we don’t touchthe manuscripts anymore ourselves. Allthe work that we are doing is done with xe-roxes or scanned copies, so now thosemanuscripts in principle will remain thereforever without being touched again.

Collaboration: Is there anythingmore being done with the manuscripts?

Matthijs: There are methods to pre-serve them, more aggressive methods, todeacidify the paper. But not all of the meth-ods are 100 percent reversible, so we arenot using them, because we try to be ascautious as possible. Anything you do tothe paper involves a risk, so we don’t doanything aggressive or irreversible.

Collaboration: So now they are storedand nobody is doing much with them?

Matthijs: Yes, we are still in the pro-cess of storing them a little more carefullywith still more acid-free and acid-absor-bent paper in between. But that will be ba-sically it.

Bob: Barbie does manual repair of thepages, but there is not a wholesale attemptto deacidify them.

Peter: If the technology improves, wemight at some point take that up.

Matthijs: But we have learned to beextremely cautious with active preserva-tion, because what has happened very of-ten in history is that people found a fantas-tic method to keep things, and then tenyears later discovered that it was a disasterthat you cannot reverse.

Collaboration: What is this new ma-chine you showed me for destroying in-sects?

Peter: It is a glass chamber that re-ceives the sun’s rays, and then holds theheat in, and you keep it at a level of 60 de-grees centigrade. It produces extreme heatthat kills the bugs through the heat itselfand through desiccation.

Matthijs: The traditional method in-

volves pesticides, but we try to do it en-tirely without pesticides. And this works.This is absolutely the minimum you can doto the manuscripts and still remove thebugs.

Collaboration: But this is only fornew manuscripts that are coming in?

Matthijs: Yes. Whatever we alreadyhave is free of bugs.

Peter: It is more for books that we aregoing to use this solar chamber. Anythingthat sits on a bookshelf in India tends toget infected with insects. So now, say, weget a nice early edition of one of Sri Auro-bindo’s books; it will probably be infestedwith bugs, so we can’t put it in our librarywithout first killing the bugs.

Matthijs: And even if we don’t seethat a book or piece of paper is infected, itis safer to treat it, because you don’t wantto introduce bugs into the general storage.

Collected works of the Mother

Collaboration: My understanding isthat when The Complete Works of Sri Au-robindo are finished the Archives will be-gin work on the Mother’s CollectedWorks?

Bob: Yes, we will try to do the samething with the Mother’s works that we didwith Sri Aurobindo’s works.

Peter: But that has been going onconcurrently for a long time. It is not likeone will finish and the other will start.

Bob: Yes, that’s right, but I would saythat the Mother’s works are on the backburner at the moment. We publish somethings of the Mother which come out inthe Bulletin, but we really haven’t takenup the Mother’s works with the idea ofchecking everything for accuracy, check-ing the translations, and incorporatingnew material. We are too busy finishing upThe Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.

Collaboration: It sounds like thatcould be a work of similar scope to that ofThe Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo?

Bob: The scope will not be as large,but it would involve a similar treatment.We will have to look at each text.There issome material that has not yet been pub-

lished, but not a huge amount.Peter: Many of the texts are oral, so it

is a different thing, and many of the textsare written in French, so we have to have adifferent set of people doing the editing.

Collaboration: Regarding the oraltexts, what is the condition of the tapes, ofthe recordings? Is that part of the Ar-chives?

Bob: No, it is done by the ProjectorRoom, the Ashram department in charge ofaudio recordings. I believe Steve Webmanhas been working with Arunkumar to putthe old tapes onto CDs.

Matthijs: It has all been digitized, so itis all there digitally. And it has also beenput onto analog tapes. But the original an-alog tapes are in an amazingly good state,much better than anybody could expect.

Collaboration: You say they havebeen digitized, but have they also beencleaned up in terms of removing static andextraneous noise? I imagine the originalrecordings were of pretty poor quality.

Peter: They are studying that prob-lem.

Matthijs: First you copy it exactly as itis. Then you make secondary copies onwhich you do the cleaning.

Collaboration: Are they doing that?Matthijs: You have to talk to Steve

Webman or Arunkumar about that. Theyalso have state-of-the-art equipment.

Collaboration: If you were checkingagainst originals, presumably you wouldbe checking against these recordings?

Matthijs: Yes, but for a lot of the textsthere is no recording anymore.

Peter: Transcripts were made and thatis all we have.

Matthijs: Because they used the sametapes again and again. They would makethe transcript of a talk and then use thatsame tape again.

Bob: We have got boxes of early tran-scripts, including many that were editedby Satprem. They haven’t been looked atcarefully, but they will become very valu-able primary material. But we have Mri-tyunjoy’s collection of typescripts of theMother’s Entretiens. They are very valu-able. We also have Sanat Banerjee’s col-


lection, which is fairly extensive, and oth-ers. We have a copy of the Entretiens inwhich Satprem has made his revisions, soby studying it you can see his method ofediting the Mother’s talks for publicationin the Bulletin and for publication as theyhave come out in the Entretiens series.

Peter: And his work would be quite le-gitimate, because oral things do need to beedited. You don’t speak in full sentences.So there is nothing wrong with that workhaving being done, but it can be checkednow.

Collaboration: So you will go overthose things again?

Bob: Yes, we will. That is the work.Whether we change it is something we willhave to decide when we see.

Peter: But it would be French speakerswho would be doing the decision-making.

Richard: The translations also needto be looked at.

Bob: The translations are often awk-ward; they are not fluid.

Collaboration: So new translationswould be made of all these things for thenew edition?

Bob: We will look at everything andsee if it needs revision and retranslation.But this is still years down the line. First wewill finish up the Complete Works.

Other work of the Archives

Collaboration: Is there other workbeing done by the Archives that we havenot touched on?

Matthijs: There is the digitization ofthe manuscripts. We are making images ofeach and every one. That has started, butit is still in its early stages.

Raman: There is also Kiran’s photog-raphy.

Bob: We are doing the same with thephotographs—digitization and storage.

Matthijs: All the photos of Sri Auro-bindo have been done, but the photos ofthe Mother are still in the process of beingdone. That is a huge job.

Peter: Also historical photographs,photographs of the Ashram, photographsof disciples will be done.

Collaboration: All of that is storedhere?

Peter: Yes. More and more we are try-ing to put things in the cold storage.

Matthijs: We have a lot of collections,but some collections are spread out. Theyare not all in one place.

Collaboration: Do you have accessto them?

Matthijs: The Archives has good rela-tions with all the people in charge of them.

Bob: Here is another thing. In theComplete Works we will have altogetherseven volumes of letters. Some, like theLetters on Yoga, won’t have the questionsof the disciples with them. In the future, wewant to bring out these letters in theirchronological order with the disciple’squestions and comments. Nirodbaran hasdone a good job of that with his own corre-spondence in two volumes. In the sameway there are many other valuable corre-spondences: Dilip Kumar Roy, for example,and Dr. Naik, whom nobody even knowsabout—these are major correspondences.We would like to bring out all of them in aquestion-answer format in the natural day-to-day order, because then you get a feel-ing for the person, for the difficulties theyhave, and Sri Aurobindo’s answers take onmore texture and appropriateness thanwhen they are divorced from the questionor the comment. It is a large work. It willtake a long time to do this rightly becausewe will follow the same process that wehave for the Complete Works. Each letterwill be read two times carefully.

Matthijs: And it involves a lot of edi-torial decisions, because for most of thecorrespondences you cannot simply pub-lish them exactly verbatim as they are.

Bob: You have to take only the rele-vant part of the question.

Peter: The questions are often terriblylong, rambling, and written in bad English,which isn’t surprising because Englishwas not the correspondent’s native tongue.

Matthijs: There are often five or tenpages of question and just one or twowords by Sri Aurobindo.

Peter: If you took a good selection ofthe questions, it might come to 15 or 20

volumes.Collaboration: So that is what you

envision doing?Bob: Absolutely.Matthijs: That should be done. But

we have first to finish what we are doing.Bob: In the Bulletin, we now have a

policy of editing the correspondences inthis way. We are doing Dr. Naik at the mo-ment, his questions with Sri Aurobindo’sanswers. But we cannot put much in an is-sue of the Bulletin. So we will start bring-ing out the correspondences in separatebooks, disciple by disciple; but again, itwill take years because it is a large work.

Collaboration: What does the Ar-chives do for researchers who come andwant to do research on Sri Aurobindo? Doyou make things available? Do you havepeople coming to do research?

Peter: If they come and they wantprinted material, we will tell them wherethey can get it. If what they want is materialthat is archival, we will make it available tothem if they are bonafide researchers—usually in the form of xeroxes. Say it issomeone researching a particular disciple,we will give them access to that disciple’spapers and correspondences. But oftenwe don’t allow people to work here itselfbecause we don’t have room and it is a bitof a distraction. But we help people if theyhave a legitimate need. So long as it is ma-terial that only we can supply, we’ll helpthem out.

Bob: You see at the moment, our mainwork is publishing Sri Aurobindo’s Com-plete Works. It takes all our time and atten-tion. We try to help people who do come.In editing the works, we are organizing allthis information that later will be availableon a larger scale to more people. But thatorganization work takes time and is beingdone slowly. We’re not in a position wherewe can advertise ourselves as a service foranything people want to know. Each ques-tion takes the time of an important person.Jayantilal used to say that ours is a quietwork, and it is to our benefit that it is quietso that we can do the foundational work.Then later on we will be able to help morepeople.


Essay

Technology and thetitan: Reflections onSri Aurobindo’sobservations of civil-ization and barbarism(conclusion)

by Richard Carlson

When speaking the language ofdigital technology one mustnot become too reliant on

words and text but must be prepared toadopt the current planetary language. Al-though software programming languagesare also an international idiom, the newlanguage referred to here is that of images.These images confront us wherever weturn, on billboards, magazines, television,film, and the Internet. In fact, a human be-ing living today digests as many images ina single day as did a person in the Victorianera during an entire lifetime.

Images are a form of digital Esperantothat the world’s population instantly com-prehends. Images are a language whoseevery frame, each of the billions upon bil-lions of them, is worth a thousand words.Due to the trans-alphabetic nature of imag-es globally, we all have come to sharesimilar reference points regardless of geo-graphical separation because identical im-ages are fed to us all, no matter where welive. In fact, we all reside in a global villagein which our relationships are mediated bytwenty-four hour coverage of a sharedelectronic grid. This grid is the central ner-vous system of our planet, a global com-mons of information that transcends anyterrestrial limit set by national boarders.

This global commons of informationburns the signs, symbols, simulations andsimulacra of mass media into the sharedscreens of our collective consciousness; aconsciousness whose gaze is increasingly

absorbed in video images.We download these imag-es daily from our local In-ternet server, CNN, Fox,Comcast, or one of othermulti-national media cor-porations. These commer-cial sources of informationmainline images edited forconsumption directly intoour passive brains so as tomake pattern recognitionof desired products or pre-ferred political agendas anunconscious affair.

These unceasing im-ages have been well-di-gested by us all: the WorldTrade Center, Osama,Terminator, McDonalds,Coca Cola, Nike, and theten thousand others, allare streamed through fiberoptics or satellite into thecomfortable viewingspace of our living rooms.Our emersion in the con-tent of these media broad-casts has allowed us all to share a plane-tary language encrypted in the digital Es-peranto of images.

Therefore, when considering how thevital will to power incarnates in techno-logy, using an image from a Hollywoodmovie only seems fitting. The image here isfrom the opening scene of the movie2001: A Space Odyssey. The image is of anape pondering a skeleton of a dead animalbefore the mysterious monolith; he picksup a jaw-bone questioningly, unsure ofwhat to do with it, and then, there isan abrupt flash in monkey consciousness,and presto, the bone is a tool. It is a weap-on! And it is the weapon that proves effec-tive in killing other apes. The dominantapes will survive into the next generation,and thus, it is the weapon that annun-ciates the evolution of consciousness!

This is to say that as fundamental as,or even simultaneous with, the cunning ofthe ratiocinating mind that createstechnology, is technology as a vehicle of

the “Will to Power” as spoken by Zara-thustra’s disciple, Nietzsche. Only nowthis is not the divine will but the vulgarhuman will to rule. As an instrument of thevulgar will to power, technology becomesa tool of domination. This should surpriseno one, because technology as an efficientweapon has determined the course of hu-man history.

Many major advances in technologyhave been funded by researching its utilityas a military application. The greatest in-ventors have all added something to theinventory of destruction. For example, thegenius of Da Vinci’s was most often en-gaged in dreaming up inventions meant formilitary applications. Although a pacifist,Albert Einstein contributed to the knowl-edge needed to create the most horrificweapon in human history. The space pro-gram, which itself was largely an instru-ment of military expansion, has given usthousands of inventions with consumerapplications. The most famous of all con-

Envision. (Digital Art by Margaret Phanes)


sumer inventions, first developed for mili-tary application by the United States De-partment of Defense, is the Internet.

Today, in this age of hyper-capitalism,global corporations drive this ferociouswill to power as well as the power of thestate. Therefore, when locating the willthat animates technology today, we mustturn to one whose expertise in weddingboth state and industry is well-known.Thus, Benito Mussolini’s dictum needs tobe remembered: “fascism is the marriage ofcorporate wealth to state military power.”If the proposition be true that the power oftechnology is largely the servant of a newform of fascism, then we are witness to amutation of fascism, one which can becalled “virtual fascism.” (Kroker, 2004, p.41) It can be called virtual fascism becausethis variety of fascism works outits will to power in a reality not de-termined by the three dimensionsof physical experience, but ratherin the non-localized sphere of cy-berspace, or the recombinant andtransgenic life forms of the petridish.

In one way, this new form offascism is enacted by “battlefieldmanagers” (the new buzz word formilitary command) who in a man-ner reminiscent of video games,direct smart bombs, and GPS-guided cruise missiles into pixelimages of whole villages and with onepress of a button wipe them out entirely.

In yet another way, the power of tech-nology follows an insatiable lust for cor-porate profits. This is the will to technolo-gy which exploits medicine, genetic engi-neering, recombinant DNA, computer net-works, and the World Wide Web to facili-tate the quarterly profits of Fortune 500corporations, irrespective of the ethicalboundaries such profit-taking may cross.

Consider the following: “Researchersat a small biotech company in Boston wantto produce a disabled human embryo—fatally flawed but capable of living for sev-eral weeks—just long enough for scien-tists to harvest the primitive stem cells socoveted for brain and heart research.

Michael West, the president of the bio-tech firm “Advanced Cell Technology”(www.advancecell.com), had this to sayabout the production of disabled embryos.“The trick will be to do just enough dam-age to preclude cells developing into a via-ble being, but not so much to interfere withthe growth of stem cells for harvest.”(West in Kroker, 2004, p. 183)

Although stem cell research may holdthe promise of providing cures for some ofthe most disabling conditions besettinghumanity such as Parkinson’s disease,one must not be a fundamentalist Christianminister to argue that the preceding state-ment by C.E.O. West poses serious ethicalquestions to matters concerning life andthe “common good.”

If the intention of some stem cell re-

searchers sounds ominous, the uninten-tional consequences of biotechnologygone awry can have even more harrowingimplications. These were described by BillJoy of Sun Microsystems:

“The twenty first century technolo-gies—genetics nano-technology androbotics—are so powerful because theyspawn whole new classes of accidents andabuses. While replication in a computernetwork can be a nuisance, at worst it dis-ables a machine or takes down a networkservice, uncontrolled self-replication inthese newer technologies runs a muchgreater risk: a risk of substantial damage tothe physical world.” (Joy, 2000) Joy wasreferring to nanotechnology which, if inpathogen form were to escape from the

laboratory and run amok into the environ-ment, could reduce the biosphere to a graygoo in a matter of days.

Just as technologies of physical self-replication threaten to create cancerousorganisms in the human body and thebody of the planet, the all-pervasive elec-tronic video screen often serves to widenthe empathetic gulf which distances usemotionally from each other. The influenceof video technology is felt not only men-tally but throughout our whole being.Although the cybernetic translation ofplanetary communication signals intoelectronic impulses which race throughthe brain at light speed no doubt affectpost-modern thought processes, theseelectronic technologies also reach deepinto the vital being.

A sense of alienation has be-come profoundly apparent in ourincreasingly urban species. AHeideggerian boredom permeatesthe sentient qualities of post-mod-ern existence. The consequence ofsuch alienation and boredom canbe enormous. For example: theWorld Health Organization reportsthat in the last 45 years—a periodwith unprecedented advances inscience and technology—suiciderates have increased 60 percent.(www.befrienders.org/suicide/statistics.htm)

In considering how a future humanitycan maintain psychological fitness andstill keep its co-evolutionary fit with anever-accelerating, socially chaotic globalenvironment, which James Joyce called a“chaosmology” (Joyce, 1939), an interest-ing comparison to make is between thepessimistic boredom of Heidegger, and theboredom of enlightenment as defined inZen and other traditions of meditation.Post-modern humanity is in desperateneed to know the technique by which thealienation of boredom can be transmutedinto the boredom of enlightenment.

Although enormous expanses of theplanet have been fiber-optically traversed,the physical separation between us as au-dience and the action we view still leaves


us a buffer of a few milliseconds betweenthe transmission of the signal to the serverand the viewer. This is not much time, but itis enough to maintain a psychologicalboundary layer and shield us from theswirl of electrons and the phenomena theyrepresent coming at us from distant placesat speeds approaching light.

Indeed the virtual realms of cyber-space are not only illumined by a Ni-etzchean “will” in vulgar form but, by aBerkleyian “idealism” as well, in that whatwe apprehend with the aid of our opticaldevices are signal, source code and simu-lation, and not the flesh and bone exist-ence embodying our present. Therefore,one suspects that cyberspace or virtualreality cannot be an authentic arbiter of thehere and now, its very design may facilitatealienation.

Moreover, our ability to empa-thize with our fellow beings is oftenundone by the video game mannerin which we come into virtual con-tact with most of them. For example,Hollywood films allow us to watchscores of people going to theirslaughter without it ever deterringthe next handful of popcorn inroute to our mouths. We set ourchildren in front of the TV or com-puter screen to pacify them so theywill not bother us with their vitalthree-dimensional demands. Weare barraged by an endless stream of pro-paganda meant to sell us everything frompolitical affiliation, to religious conver-sions, to unending sexual performance.

This disconnect between human be-ings is also manifest in the rapidly growingdivision of the world’s population intogroups of haves and have-nots, which in-creasingly means those with access totechnology and those without. The gap inwealth between the world’s richest andpoorest citizens is at its greatest disparityin recorded history.

This disparity of wealth has not onlyresulted in third-world deprivation, buthas caused a backlash, often sponsoredby fundamentalist religious terrorism.These reactionary movements often draw

sustenance and support by appealing tothe dispossessed who have been left outof the technologically enabled globaleconomy. Many anti-modernist move-ments that appeal to ethnocentric ideals ofculture and community are swelling in theirranks. This movement is due in part to a re-actionary opposition to a perceived cultur-al imperialism, largely imported throughtechnological advances of the hyper-capi-talist enterprise.

The digital divide is not the onlybyproduct of technology that separateshumankind, an emotional divide alsolooms large on the horizon. The mediationof technology in human affairs has alsoincreased the emotional distances be-tween us. This emotional distance is re-flected in the exponential rise of violence

and mental illness of the past century.While technology grew at its fastest, sub-duing us with its utopian promise whilehaving its greatest successes, it out-pacedour ethical reflections and overwhelmedour emotional perceptions.

During the century of unprecedentedtechnological advance, when science fa-cilitated an increase in our life expectancyand our level of comfort, from out of theblind spot of human history the shadowyprojection of the will to power, of the will totechnology, reached out to wreak carnageover most of the planet to ensure that thislast century would be the most murderous.

So what happens now at the dawn of anew millennium? What is our promisedfuture? Will it be a future in which technol-

ogy, both informational and biological, ul-timately fulfills the project of a perverseform of Nietzschean “completed nihilism,”of “the will to power” manifesting a reac-tionary vision of the “ubermensch” in themarriage of multi-national corporationsand military power? What is the futurepromise of the will to technology?

Before considering this question letsexplore the future as conceived by SriAurobindo. The future promise which ismade to us by Sri Aurobino and Mother orthe promise de l’Avenir can be succinctlyput in a few lines from Savitri:

When superman is born as Nature’s kingHis presence shall transfigure Matter’s

world:He shall light up Truth’s fire in

Nature’s night,He shall lay upon the earth

Truth’s greater law;Man too shall turn towards the

Spirit’s call.Awake to his hidden possibility,Awake to all that slept within his

heart

The hidden possibility inmankind to surpass its own hu-manity is made possible by themanifestation of a gnostic beingwho is endowed with a con-sciousness superior to mind,

known aptly as the supermind. Sri Aurob-indo describes the traits of the gnostic be-ing, and cautions against confusing thisnew type of individual with other prophe-cies of supermanhood:

A life of gnostic beings carrying theevolution to a higher supramentalstatus might fitly be characterizedas a divine life; for it would be a lifein the Divine, a life of beginnings ofa spiritual divine light and powerand joy manifested in materialNature. That might be described,since it surpasses the mental humanlevel, as a life of spiritual and supra-mental supermanhood. But thismust not be confused with past andpresent ideas of supermanhood; for


supermanhood in the mental ideaconsists of an overtopping of thenormal human level, not in kind butin degree of the same kind, by anenlarged personality, a magnifiedand exaggerated ego, an increasedpower of mind, an increased powerof vital force, a refined or dense andmassive exaggeration of the forcesof the human ignorance; it carriesalso, commonly implied in it, theidea of a forceful domination overhumanity by the superman. Thatwould mean a supermanhood of theNietzchean type . . . But earth hashad enough of this kind in her pastand its repetition can only prolongthe old lines; she can get no trueprofit for her future, no power ofself-exceeding from the Titan, theAsura: even a great or supernormalpower in it could only carry her onlarger circles of her old orbit. (TheLife Divine, 1949, pp. 1067-68)

In considering the future evolution ofconsciousness and which track humanitymay take, one must be cognizant of thetypes of future biological mutations thatmay be in store for humanity. In addition,one must also consider the historical andcontemporary attempts that have beenmade to enhance the human condition.

The first wave of eugenics was deter-mined biologically by Darwin and sociallyby Spenser as a survival of the fittest. Thesecond wave of eugenics coupled racialtheories to the notion of survival of the fit-test in the pure blood of the Aryan Nazi, orin the practices of killing or sterilizing peo-ple thought to be inferior, be they Jews,aboriginals, lower castes, or the mentallyill. The question now is what will the thirdwave of eugenics bring? The differencebetween humanity’s prior experience ofeugenics and its next incarnation will bethat previously it has been the tool of au-thoritative science and ideological re-gimes, whereas the next wave of eugenicsis certain to be driven by neo-liberal eco-nomics following the incentive of profit.

Arthur Kroker has thought throughthe Nietzschean implications of eugenicsand wonders if the world today is facing

twenty-first century engineering withnineteenth century ethics and asks whatwill be the consequences of the hype sur-rounding the human genome project andother big science endeavors: “in the fieldof biotechnology and bio-pharmacologywith their delirious schemes for the post-human body in a post-evolutionary time,”and asks “are we really ready for the cul-ture of the double? [i.e., clone]” and “dowe really understand the fate of the trans-genic body?” (Kroker, 2004, p. 209)

Keeping in mind that Sri Aurobindohas written that the advent of the supra-mental consciousness may also transcendmany moral and ethical values that we cur-rently hold, we should expect the un-expected. In considering the moral ambi-guity that may surround the coming of thefuture, we should remember the lines fromthe haunting poem, The Hour of God:

Nor let worldly prudence whispertoo closely in thy ear, for it is theHour of the unexpected.

In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo reveals the

chilling voice of the will to power in thevoice of the titanic ego whose unbridledvital being merges with a cunning mind toglorify itself, through its mastery of tech-nology and its domination over the physi-cal life on earth. Always at the mercy of aninsatiable hunger for power, this exagger-ated ego—like the ubermensch overcom-ing mere humanity—sets its sights on theheavens. Have we yet to encounter such abeing?

“I have grown greater than Nature, wiserthan God.

I have made real what she never dreamed,I have seized her powers and harnessed

for my work,I have shaped her metals and new metals

made;I will make glass and raiment out of milk,Make iron velvet, water unbreakable

stone,Like God in his astuce of artist skill,Mould from one primal plasm protean

forms,

In single Nature multitudinous lives,All that imagination can conceiveIn mind intangible, remould anewIn Matter’s plastic solid and concrete.No magic can surpass my magic’s skill.There is no miracle I shall not achieve.What God imperfect left, I will complete,Out of a tangled mind and half-made soulHis sin and error I will eliminate;What he invented not, I shall invent:He was the first creator, I am the last.I have found the atoms from which he

built the worlds:The first tremendous cosmic energyMissioned shall leap to slay my enemy

kin,Expunge a nation or abolish a race,Death’s silence leave where there was

laughter and joy.Or the fissured invisible shall spend

God’s forceTo extend my comforts and expand my

wealth,To speed my car which now the lightings

driveAnd turn the engines of my miracles.I will take his means of sorcery from his

handsAnd do with them greater wonders than

his best.Yet through it all I have kept my bal-

anced thought;I have studied my being, I have examined

the world,I have grown a master of the arts of life.I have tamed the wild beast, trained to be

my friend;He guards my house, looks up waiting

my will.I have taught my kind to serve and to

obey.I have used the mystery of the cosmic

wavesTo see far distance and to hear far

words;I have conquered Space and knitted

close all earth.Soon I shall know the secrets of the

Mind;I play with knowledge and with igno-

ranceAnd sin and virtue my inventions are


I can transcend or sovereignly use.I shall know mystic truths, seize occult

powers.I shall slay my enemies with a look or

thought,I shall sense the unspoken feelings of all

heartsAnd see and hear the hidden thoughts of

men.When earth is mastered, I shall conquer

heaven;The gods shall be my aides or menial folk,No wish I harbor unfulfilled shall die:Omnipotence and omniscience shall be

mine.” (Savitri, pp. 512-513)

The promises of some future technol-ogies seem to come right out of the pagesof Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Thesetechnologies are poised to perversely dis-tort nature, much like Victor Frankenstein’screature. It is only normal to cringe at thethought of silicon embedded in humanflesh, of crossing human genes with thoseof animals, or cloning a human being. All ofthese very possible productions of futuretechnologies seem to embody evil itself.But then again, we should expect the unex-pected.

Cultural historian William Irwin Thomp-son writes that what we perceive as evilmay well annunciate the next stage of glo-bal evolution (Thompson, 1980). Thinkagain about the ape and the weapon, orabout how the Greeks, the Romans, theVikings, and then the colonial powers de-stroyed many indigenous cultures, yetthrough the roads they built and the traderoutes they initiated, they facilitated a glo-bal culture of trade and interaction whichultimately spread western philosophyeastward and eastern philosophy west-ward—in other words, they furthered theevolution of consciousness.

This is not to rationalize or excuse theviolence that makes imperialism or thetransfer of culture possible, but merely tostate that the evolution of consciousnessproceeds by means that often transcendour notions of good and evil. Although theprospect of cloned human flesh or siliconchips embedded in the brain may seem re-

pugnant to us now, for all we know, theseor similar inventions may determine the fu-ture passages that the evolution of con-sciousness will take in exceeding the bio-logical constraints placed upon it bydwelling in the body of the human species.

One can even ask: Would the fulfill-ment of nihilism in the deconstruction oftranscendent values and the triumph ofthe Nietzschean superman, or the super-organization through technological con-quest of global commerce and the culturalNoosphere, be a necessary stage in thetransition to the supramental manifesta-tion? Or would it provide a counterpoint toa more spiritually ordered mutation?

Whatever the answers, the techno-logical future is in some respects challeng-ing our notion of what it means to be hu-man. In fact, the current idiom in contem-porary culture used to describe the phe-nomena of transcending the definition ofhumanity is referred to as “post-human.”How might humanity itself assist nature increating this new species of post-humans?

In addition to the simple ethical ques-tions raised by the thought of humans cre-ating their successor species, there are realimplications here for the integral yogacommunity. The following quote from TheLife Divine suggests that on the surfacetechnology will play an important role inthe future evolution of consciousness asenvisaged by Sri Aurobindo:

Consciousness itself by its muta-tion will necessitate and operatewhatever mutation is needed for thebody. It has to be noted that thehuman mind has already shown thecapacity to aid nature in theevolution of new types of plant andanimal; it has created new forms ofits environment, developed byknowledge and disciplineconsiderable changes in its ownmentality. It is not an impossibilitythat man should aid natureconsciously also in his ownspiritual and physical evolutionand transformation [emphasisadded]. The urge to do it is alreadythere and partly effective though

still incompletely understood andaccepted by the surface mentality;but one day it may understand, godeeper within itself and discover themeans, the secret energy, theintended operation of Conscious-ness-Force within which is thehidden reality of what we callNature. (p. 844)

Among major western philosophers,none have thought more about technolo-gy and its implications than has MartinHeidegger. In his view, technology openeditself to diametric polarities of promise andperil. While perceiving the assault to ourfeeling life and our ability to care for thethings of the world, he condemned tech-nology as a vehicle of fascist propaganda,military domination, and the hyper-capital-ist enterprise of power and subjugation.He also realized that it was difficult for anyof us not to participate in its ideologicalprogram.

Heidegger nonetheless perceivedthat technology could retain the promisegiven to it in the original Greek term,techne. The term was once synonymouswith art as well as with technique. In fact,ideally, techne was considered to be thevehicle by which truth manifested beauty.Techne was entwined with poesis, artisticcreativity and meaning-making. Technolo-gy was the vehicle that revealed the artis-tic aspiration for truth and beauty. “Oncethere was a time when the bringing forth ofthe true into the beautiful was calledtechne, . . . Once that revealing that bringsforth truth into the splendor of radiant ap-pearing also was called techne.” (Heideg-ger, 1977, p. 36) As an example, think againabout the skillful use of the technology ofphotography in the photographs of SriAurobindo taken by Cartier-Bresson.There you have it, with its ability to tran-scend mere simulation or reproduction, theCartier-Bresson photographs have be-come technological vehicles of revelation!

Beyond the ability of technology toprove revelatory and a vehicle for the forceof truth, it can also enhance and extendhuman life itself. Indeed, technology hasimproved the quality of life for most of the


world. Even those left out of the techno-logical gold rush, who are on the other sideof the digital divide, are beneficiaries insome manner or other of the wonders oftechnology. The extension of life expect-ancy made possible by such advances inmedicine as the small pox and polio vac-cines, or the cures it has made available fordysentery, malaria, influenza and a host ofother ailments that have beset humankindfrom its inception, are testaments to the mi-raculous advances of science.

Sri Aurobindo has written that the hu-man mind can aid in the evolution of con-sciousness, and has said: “Science has al-ready enlarged for good the intellectualhorizons of the race and raised, sharpenedand intensified powerfully the general in-tellectual capacity of mankind.”

(The Hu-

man Cycle, 1972, p. 70) However, SriAurobindo was also akeen observer of societyand economics and waswell aware of the hiddenagendas that could drivescientific research. Heknew that science isa production of cultureand not solely a dispas-sionate enterprise. Hetermed the use of science driven by themotivations of economic self-aggrandize-ment as a recurrent form of “barbarism,”which in earlier epochs had manifested inthe rule of the dictator and the power of theconquering nomadic clan.

Science that is funded by the market-place with its lust for profit, or by militaryinterests that view populations in terms ofbody counts, gives rise to today’s recur-rent barbarism. Science as vehicle for themanifestation of the asuric force has besethumanity with the plague of technologiesthat threaten its own existence. The vulgarwill to power intent on insuring its domina-tion fetishes technology, whether the met-allurgy of the sword in days gone by or thenanotechnology of the terrorist yet tocome. The will to power quite naturallymanifests itself in a will to technology.

In the following passage, Sri Auro-bindo defines this cultural phenomena of

science as a new type of barbarism: “Sci-ence pursuing its cold and even way hasmade discoveries which have served onone side a practical humanitarianism, onthe other supplied monstrous weapons toegoism and mutual destruction; it hasmade possible a gigantic efficiency of or-ganization which has been used on oneside for the economic and social ameliora-tion of the nations and on the other forturning each into a colossal battering-ramof aggression, ruin and slaughter. It hasgiven rise on the one side to a large ratio-nalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, onthe other it has justified a godless egoism,vitalism, vulgar will to power and suc-cess.” (The Human Cycle, 1972, p. 111)

So just what are the social implica-tions for integral yoga in an age ofNietzschean nihilism? In writing the Will to

Power a century ago, Nietzsche said thathe was writing prophecy for the next twohundred years. (Kroker, 2004, p. 84) In thisprophecy, metaphysics completes itself inthe pure will of the Nietzschen superman.In this will to power, the asuric qualities ofthe vital being enforce their will on a worldstripped of any and all referents to being,values, or qualities. In this inversion ofmetaphysics, rationality serves the will inits domination.

Driven by the forces of control andpower, imagination will effectuate its cre-ations in worlds of simulations, worldswhere the map of the propagandist pre-cedes the reality of actual territory. Theseworlds will be defined by the conditions ofthe marketplace. All reference to eternalideas will be banished in the pure lightspeed of fiber optics as the pure circula-tion of power merges man and machineinto a species governed by “business at

the speed of thought.” (Gates, 2000)In reaction to the deconstruction of

indigenous social value systems, nodoubt the poor and those disenfranchisedby the lack of technology, subjugated bycultural imperialism, exploited as economicserfs, will become ever more stridently mil-itant. In reaction to the mounting poverty,the perceived servitude to the world’swealthiest nations, and the threat to cul-tural and religious values, those whosesituation appears hopeless will surely at-tempt to hold on to those ideals and valuestranscendent to their experience of theworld. The world given to them by the glo-bal economy and technology will seemprofane and a threat to their indigenouscultural existence.

Some who hold fast to the law of theword or the book will be motivated by

those whose own vul-gar will to power seeksto express itself throughthe fundamentalism oftheir faith, and will sure-ly strike back. Septem-ber 11, 2001 may only beonly the first of a seriesof blows wrought uponthe first world by tech-

nologies of their creation. On September11th it was jet planes that inflicted the dam-age. There are, however, technologieswhose potential for destruction dwarf thedamage done on that day in 2001.

Science can have many unintendedconsequences. Think of the intention ofthe Internet first as tool of the defense de-partment and which now has become aplanetary communication system, or howbiological research has morphed into aninstrument for creating weapons of massdestruction. This is an especially disquiet-ing thought in that “today anything ispossible. As soon as you get beyond hi-jackings and car bombs, and things likethat you entertain the possibility of nucle-ar, bacteriological, or chemical terrorism.The door is wide open, September 11opened Pandora’s box.” (Virilio, 2002, p.178) Advances in science and their effecton culture may either support or deter an

The vulgar will to power intent on insuring itsdomination fetishes technology, whether themetallurgy of the sword in days gone by or thenanotechnology of the terrorist yet to come.


environment receptive to the completionof Integral Yoga.

Although the organizing ideas driv-ing research and technology will play adecisive role in the outcome of how sci-ence shapes culture and facilitates eitherspirituality or nihilism, one must not over-look the role of the accident or catastrophein determining the course of evolution.The potential of science and technologyto facilitate the transformation of con-sciousness in its physical, vital, and men-tal formulations is likely to be determinedby the conscious intent of the person orthe culture wielding it as a tool. However,all the work of science could be undone byan accident, or a terrorist, who acts as thecybernetic shadow of the will to techno-logy; as an agent of science’s unintendedconsequence.

With its focus on the evolution ofconsciousness, no other yoga or spiritualpractice has quite the same stake in thefuture of the earth as does Integral Yoga.The issue of the future and Integral Yogaraises some further questions: might aNietzschean future be a necessary transi-tion toward the superman which Sri Auro-bindo heralds? Or is the promise of thefuture to be gained only by a consciouseffort to free ourselves from the barbarismof the will to power manifest in the will totechnology?

Sri Aurobindo actively worked for thereceptivity of the truth consciousness onthe earth, and worked expressly againstthose asuric forces and conditions of ig-norance that could deter the evolution ofconsciousness. As we find in the bookEvening Conversations, Sri Aurobindoengaged regularly in discussions aboutworld affairs and the course of history. Inhis writings on culture and civilization, his-tory, culture, science, and art are all shownas having relevance for spiritual growth inlight of the yoga.

The future should be especially rele-vant to a community whose yoga placesso high a stake in it. It matters to the extenttechnology will facilitate or deter theworldly conditions in which human con-sciousness evolves, and detracts from or

intensifies the aspiration for world har-mony. The question can now be asked,how is all this a matter of concern for thecommunity of Integral Yoga?

Visualize again the film 2001: A SpaceOdyssey, in which a computer, Hal, hasbeen so animated with a will to survive byits human programmers that its own sur-vival threatens the existence of the hu-mans it was created to serve. Humans havebeen reduced to servo-mechanisms for themachine. Or think of a more banal image,that of the IBM calculating machines,which were used by the Nazi’s to makepossible the systematic round up, trans-ference and slaughter of the Jews of Eu-rope; a simple technology in the service ofa society with a perverse eugenic agenda.(http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com)

When the fascist regimes of Europe inthe 1940s posed a threat to the evolutionof consciousness, with their lust for globaldomination and its perversion of the Ni-etzschean ideal of the superman, SriAurobindo and the Mother both materiallyand occultly intervened to help halt its ad-vance. Although a direct comparison be-tween world events of the 1940s and thetechnological advances of the early twen-ty-first century certainly cannot be made,the eras have certain occult correlationsregarding their consequences for the evo-lution of consciousness. The hidden forc-es driving events in both times share aninsatiable lust for the will to power.

The current age of unconstrained glo-bal capitalism driven by a hyper-vitalitybears a striking correlation to the commer-cial age described in the chapter of TheHuman Cycle entitled “Civilization andBarbarism.” Here Sri Aurobindo writes: “ina commercial age with its ideal, vulgar andbarbarous, of success, vitalistic satisfac-tion, productiveness and possession thesoul of man may linger for a while for cer-tain gains and experiences, but cannot per-manently rest. If it persisted too long, Lifewould become clogged and perish of itsown plethora or burst in its straining to agross expansion. Like the too massive Ti-tan it will collapse by its own mass, moleruet sua.” (The Human Cycle, 1972, p. 73)

If this is the case—keeping in mindthe historical interventions in worldly af-fairs which Sri Aurobindo and the Motherhave previously taken—isn’t it incumbenton a community which seeks to fulfill thefuture promise of its founders, of a life di-vine, of the transformation of matter, to notonly concentrate its practice on the innerindividual dimensions of the transforma-tion of consciousness, but also, as a re-flection of that practice, to acknowledgeand critique the processes of science andtechnology that may either facilitate orthwart the realization of that promise? Wecan, of course, choose to ignore the yogain the world, but if we do, it would be bestto remain on guard, so as not to be crushedwhen the titan falls.

References

Gates, B. Business at the Speed ofThought, New York, Warner BusinessBooks (2000)

Heidegger, M. The Question Con-cerning Technology and other Essays.New York, Harper and Row (1977)

Joy, B. “Why the Future Doesn’tNeed Us,” Wired Magazine (April 2000)

Joyce, J. Finnegan’s Wake. New York,Penguin Books (1939)

Kroker, A, The Will to Technology andthe Culture of Nihilism. Toronto, Univer-sity of Toronto Press (2004)

Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power. W.Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans.New York, Vintage Press (1968)

Sri Aurobindo. The Hour of God,Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press(1972)

Sri Aurobindo. The Human Cycle.Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press(1972)

Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine,Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press(1972)

Sri Aurobindo. Savitri, Pondicherry,Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press (1972)

Thompson W.I. Evil and World Or-der. New York, Harper Collins (1980)

Virilio P., Crepuscular Dawn, Cam-bridge MA, MIT Press (2002)


Source Material

The problem ofhuman disunity

by Sri Aurobindo

Our nature, our consciousness isthat of beings ignorant of eachother, separated from each other,

rooted in a divided ego, who must strive toestablish some kind of relation betweentheir embodied ignorances; for the urge tounion and forces making for union arethere in Nature. Individual and group har-monies of a comparative and qualifiedcompleteness are created, a social cohe-sion is accomplished; but in the mass therelations formed are constantly marred byimperfect sympathy, imperfect under-standing, gross misunderstandings, strife,discord, unhappiness. It cannot be other-wise so long as there is no true union ofconsciousness founded upon a nature ofself-knowledge, inner mutual knowledge,inner realisation of unity, concord of ourinner forces of being and inner forces oflife. In our social building we labour to es-tablish some approach to unity, mutuality,harmony, because without these thingsthere can be no perfect social living; butwhat we build is a constructed unity, anassociation of interests and egos enforcedby law and custom and imposing an artifi-cial constructed order in which the inter-ests of some prevail over the interests ofothers and only a half accepted half en-forced, half natural half artificial accommo-dation keeps the social whole in being.Between community and community thereis a still worse accommodation with a con-stant recurrence of the strife of collectiveego with collective ego. This is the bestthat we can do and all our persistent re-adjustments of the social order can bringus nothing better than an imperfect struc-ture of life.

It is only if our nature develops be-yond itself, if it becomes a nature of self-

knowledge, mutualu n d e r s t a n d i n g ,unity, a nature oftrue being and truelife that the resultcan be a perfectionof ourselves andour existence, a lifeof true being, a lifeof unity, mutuality,harmony, a life oftrue happiness, aharmonious andbeautiful life. If ournature is fixed inwhat it is, what ithas already be-come, then no perfection, no real and en-during happiness is possible in earthlylife; we must seek it not at all and do thebest we can with our imperfections, or wemust seek it elsewhere, in a supraterrestrialhereafter, or we must go beyond all suchseeking and transcend life by an extinctionof nature and ego in some Absolute fromwhich this strange and unsatisfactory be-ing of ours has come into existence. But ifin us there is a spiritual being which isemerging and our present state is only animperfection or half-emergence, if the In-conscient is a starting-point containing initself the potency of a Superconscienceand Supernature which has to evolve, aveil of apparent Nature in which that great-er consciousness is concealed and fromwhich it has to unfold itself, if an evolutionof being is the law, then what we are seek-ing for is not only possible but part of theeventual necessity of things. It is our spir-itual destiny to manifest and become thatSupernature,—for it is the nature of ourtrue self, our still occult, because une-volved, whole being. A nature of unity willthen bring inevitably its life-result of unity,mutuality, harmony. An inner life awak-ened to a full consciousness and to a fullpower of consciousness will bear its inev-itable fruit in all who have it, self-knowl-edge, a perfected existence, the joy of asatisfied being, the happiness of a fulfillednature. (The Life Divine, pp. 1034-1036)

The collective andthe individual inthe supramentalmanifestation

by the Mother

I think that [the manifestation of thesupramental] will happen the momentthere is a sufficiently large number of con-sciousnesses which feel absolutely that itcannot be otherwise. Now, most people,the immense majority among you have tomake an effort to imagine what it will be,and at best, speculate upon it and perhapshope that the transformation will makethings more pleasing, more pleasant—something like that. But your conscious-ness is so attached to what is, that it evenfinds it difficult to imagine that things canbe otherwise. And until what must be be-comes for a sufficiently big group of con-sciousnesses an inevitable necessity, andall that has been and all that still is atpresent appears like an absurdity whichcannot last . . . it is at that moment that this[manifestation] can take place, not before.

There remains a problem, namely,whether it is something which can takeplace and will take place individually be-fore occurring collectively. It is probable.But no individual manifestation can be

Sri Aurobindo. (photo courtesy Sri Aurobindo Ashram)


complete nor even approach this perfec-tion if it is not in harmony with at least agroup of consciousnesses representativeof a new world. In spite of everything thereis so great an interdependence of the indi-vidual and the collectivity, that the indi-vidual realization, despite all, is limited, im-poverished by the irresponsive atmo-sphere—if I may say so—of what sur-rounds it. And it is certain that the entireterrestrial life has to follow a certain curveof progress, so that a new world and a newconsciousness can manifest. And that iswhy I said at the beginning that it dependsat least partially on you.

Have you ever tried to picture whatthis new consciousness could be andwhat a new race could be like, and finallywhat a new world could be like?

By analogy, it is quite obvious thatthe arrival of man upon earth has changedthe earth-condition. I cannot say that froma certain point of view this was for thegreatest of all, because there are many whohave suffered terribly from it, and here it isobvious that the complications the humanbeing has brought into life have not al-ways been very favorable either for him orfor others. But from a certain point of viewthis has brought about a considerableprogress, even in the lower species: manmeddled with the life of metals, of minerals;as I said, it was not always for the greatestjoy of those he dealt with, but still it cer-tainly changed their conditions of life con-

siderably. Well, inthe same way, it isprobable that thesupramental be-ing, whatever itmight be, will con-siderably changethe life of theearth. In our heartand our thoughtwe hope that allthe evils the earthsuffers from will beat least ameliorat-ed if not cured,and that the gener-al conditions will

be more harmonious, in any case more tol-erable. This may happen, because it wasthe very nature of the mental conscious-ness which incarnated in man,. Who actedfor his own satisfaction, with his own de-velopment in view, and without much con-sideration for the consequences of his ac-tions. Perhaps the Supermind will act moreharmoniously. In any case we hope so.That is how we conceive of it . . .

So, if it is the right time, this is how theproblem is put: there are people who areready or will become ready, and these pre-cisely will be the first to start on the newpath. There are others who, perhaps, willbecome aware of it too late, who will havemissed the opportunity; I think there willbe many of this kind. But in any case, mypoint of view is this: even if there shouldbe only half a chance, it would be worththe trouble of trying. For after all . . . I don’tknow . . . I told you just now, there is amoment when life such as it is, the humanconsciousness such as it is, seems some-thing absolutely impossible to bear, it cre-ates a kind of disgust, repugnance; onesays, “No, it is not that, it is not that; it can’tbe that, it can’t continue.” Well, when onecomes to this, there is only to throw inone’s all—all one’s effort, all one’sstrength, all one’s life, all one’s being —into this chance, if you like, or this excep-tional opportunity that is given to crossover to the other side. What a relief to setfoot on the new path, that which will lead

you elsewhere! This is worth the trouble ofcasting behind much luggage, of gettingrid of many things in order to be able totake that leap. That’s how I see the problem.

In fact it is the sublimest of adven-tures, and if one has in him in the slightestthe true spirit of adventure, it is worth risk-ing all for all. But those who are afraid, whowonder, “Am I not going to let go the sub-stance for the shadow?” according to themost banal proverb one can imagine, thosewho tell themselves, “Bah! After all it isbetter to profit by what one has than to risklosing everything, we don’t know what isgoing to happen tomorrow, let us take pre-cautions” . . . unfortunately this is verywidespread, extremely widespread . . . well,about those who are in this state of mind, Ican assure you of one thing: that evenwhen the thing occurs before their verynose, they will not perceive it. They willsay, “It is good, in this way I won’t regretanything.” It is possible. But perhaps laterthey will; this we do not know.

In any case what I call being sincere isthis: if one thinks that this new realisationis the only thing which is truly worth beinglived; if what is, is intolerable—not onlyfor oneself, perhaps not so much for one-self . . . but still, if one is not absolutelyselfish and mean, one feels that, truly, ithas lasted long enough, that one has hadenough of it, that it must change—well,when one feels like that, one takes every-thing, all that one is, all that one can, allthat one has, and one throws oneself intoit completely without ever looking behind,and come what may! I indeed feel that itwould be preferable even to plunge into anabyss in this way than to be on the shore,trembling and wondering, “What will hap-pen tomorrow if I take this rather rashstep?” There we are. (From Questions andAnwers, 24 November 1954)

An entirely new consciousness in manyindividuals transforming their whole be-ing . . . is needed for the new life to appear;only such a transformation of the generalmind, life, body nature can bring into be-ing a new worthwhile collective exist-ence. (The Life Divine, p. 1061)

The Mother. (photo courtesy Sri Aurobindo Ashram)


The poetry roomFrom Love and death

In the woodlands of the bright and early world,When love was to himself yet new and warmAnd stainless, played like morning with a flowerRuru with his young bride Priyumvada.Fresh-cheeked and dew-eyed white PriyumvadaOpened her budded heart of crimson bloomTo love, to Ruru; Ruru, a happy floodOf passion round a lotus dancing thrilled,Blinded with his soul’s waves Priyumvada.To him the earth was a bed for this sole flower,To her all the world was filled with his embrace.Wet with new rains the morning earth, releasedFrom her fierce centuries and burning suns,Lavished her breath in greenness; poignant flowersThronged all her eager breast, and her young armsCradled a childlike bounding life that playedAnd would not cease, nor ever weary grewOf her bright promise; for all was joy and breezeAnd perfume, colour and bloom and ardent raysOf living; and delight desired the world.Then Earth was quick and pregnant timelessly;A free and unwalled race possessed her plainsWhose hearts uncramped by bonds, whose unspoiled thoughtsAt once replied to light. Foisoned the fields;Lonely and rich the forests and the swayingOf those unnumbered tops affected menWith thoughts to their vast music kin. UndammedThe virgin rivers moved towards the sea,And mountains yet unseen and peoples vagueWinged young imagination like an eagleTop strange beauty remote. And Ruru feltThe sweetness of the early earth as sapAll through him, and short life an aeon madeBy boundless possibility, and love,Sweetest of all unfathomable love,A glory untired. As a bright bird comes flyingFrom airy extravagance to his own home,And breasts his mate, and feels her all his goal,So from boon sunlight and the fresh chill waveWhich swirled and lapped between the slumbering fields,From forest pools and wanderings mid leavesThrough emerald ever-new discoveries,Mysterious hillsides ranged and buoyant-swiftRaces with our wild brothers in the meads,Came Ruru back to the white-bosomed girl,Strong-winged to pleasure. She all fresh and newRose to him, and he plunged into her charm.

—Sri Aurobindo

She truly loved

A sea of serenity, none would suspectThat the worm of doubt could tormentThis pure petal of spirituality.Her fine face was haloed by a luminous grace.Command and humility were manifest in every gesture.In her presence the stricken of the world feltCare fly, and their griefs melted at her merest touch.A strange flood of joy coursed through their heartsAt a calm word of sage advice from her lips.Alight with adoration, her eyes sparkled brighterThan the many candles on different altars.She whose arms had never clasped a lover or a son,Who had forsaken soft bed and epicurean delight,Her compassion wafted over all lives like a caress of incense,Desire she had none but coveted only to be worthy of Him,Self-abnegation’s monument and patience incarnate.This flower of Europe’s high nobility had beenThe belle of a season, the rage of a year,But bent on an upward path, on her Godward wayHad conquered earthly temptations, renounced sin and virtue.Today she stood devoid of peace and detachment,For yesterday when she had gone to inspect the workOf the great painter of France invited by the churchTo sanctify further by beauty’s brushThe sanctum sanctorum, she had stood transfixedAt the sublime transformation wrought by his inspired work.Then she had advanced with a grateful heart to bless him.The painter beholding her snow-white and delicate pure hands,Due to deep veneration didn’t want them to be sulliedBy a touch of his dust and cobweb-covered head.

He also was a noble soul like thosePainters and sculptors of India who gave their livesTo the Lord’s adoration, leaving no name for posterityTo remember. Day after day he visited the great cathedralsTo get inspiration and strength for this noble work.During these months nothing passed his lips except a monk’s fare.Yet in modern times when virtue is at a discountAnd goodness is taken as the hallmark of the weak,He hid his gentle saintly character under a mask of worldliness,Above all he could not bear to be thanked.He forestalled the shower of gratitude by saying —“Mother! come not too near this sinner.Your robe of virtue will be defacedBy my million stains and lapses.Last night only I lay with a harlot.”

The reverend mother stunned by these alien wordsStopped, her gentle hands half-raised in blessings.Enjoying her discomfiture, the painter in innocent mischief


Mocked her further, ”Mother Superior,Christ took the sins of all men on Himself,Can’t His daughter do the same?”Though her heart was shocked, the iron discipline held.With an outward detachment the Mother said,“God bless you, my friend.” But her steps wereA little too hasty and her departure looked like a retreat.

The painter laughed heartily at his own prankFor he had seen her flesh shrink at his brash admonition.Ignorant of how sorely he had troubled that gentle soulThe painter’s brush became more revelatory and vigorous,As he painted the last angel in the likeness of the Mother

Superior,The saintly being whom he secretly adored.

Her vesper prayers done, aves offered,A simple supper disposed of and night’s blessings given to all,The Mother retired to her room illumed by a single candle.This night which her soul told her would be her last,For the shadow of the future sometimes falls on our senses.She whose life had been purer than the driven snow,Who had achieved, in her ninety yearsMore than a mortal can hope or God demand,Now felt defeated by the painter’s taunt.Inwardly she knew that she had felt a repulsionAt touching the man who had thus loudly proclaimed his sins.

The moment was near for leaving the earthly abode,The dawn was waiting to usher her to her heavenly home,But she felt some high task remained unfulfilled,Something had been left undone.She knelt before the icon given to her by the Count, her father,A family heirloom of which all Christendom had heard.A calm beyond words settled on her,And a love from heaven filled her heart,As with a beatific smile she roseTaking the holy icon from its sanctified niche,Opening the door, with firm steps she went whereThe painter worked tonight to finish his work —For the morrow’s Feast of Redemption.Her faithful servitor Sister Bernadette,Dozing on her stool, awoke at the opening of the door,And was transfixed by the nimbus around the Mother’s face.She could have vowed on Holy BibleThat she saw light linger in the Mother’s footsteps.Oblivious to her follower the saint glidedOn her last errand, to her final triumph.The painter startled by her presence at that hourAnd by her radiant face of incarnate loveInvoluntarily kneeled. Giving the icon to himThe Mother said, “Friend! Here is a present for you.”

Thus rising above sin and virtue she sankIn front of the magnificence which the artistJust before she came had unveiled. The churchWas inexplicably filled with a heavenly scent,As all the angels in all the frescoes assumed her likeness.And the two present heard a divine voice say,“She truly loved.”

—Shyam Kumari

A quarry lagoon

The Quincy quarries at one time yielded the best gradesof granite rock for use around the world. An igneous or volcanic

rock,granite surfaces under pressure in a volcano.

Hot summer days we would take the busor thumb rides or drive from Roxburyto the Quincy woodlands.

Ages eleven to thirteen, we street kids would climb the trailup green hills to wild raspberry and blueberry patchesand the water-filled quarries, isolatedrock excavations of graniteand marble, boulders and stones.

The old Granite Railway Company in Quincy once hauledboulders

for building and stone used for church statuesas in India, quarried granite left from glacialor prehistoric times, or excavated

for churches and tombstones of Bostonand environs, and lighthousesof the nineteenth century.

We swam the fresh spring waterand frolicked leaping or high divingoff quarry rock ledges.

A mysterious presence pervaded these abandoned quarries,an eerie and exotic beauty of reflecting pools,greenish blue water where floated leaves,

insects, branches, twigs, small logs, dust,soil carried by winds from rocks,trees and plants.Watery pools of bottomless excavations. What were their

depths?


The legend of a shrinking corpsefloating to the surface. Youthful bravado and rashantics in the mysterium tremendum.Configured granite blocks with high outlook precipicesand Brahmic views of surrounding woods for milesunder a panoply of sky and clouds.

Beneath graffiti rock walls of rugged crags and steepcliffs forlorn like a jungle lagoonwe swam the quarry freshin summer or early autumn, or spring.We would climb to more elevated rocksand grey ledges, then dive from the steeper cliff’shigh rock landings.

When we reached the very top landing “Rooftop,”we would survey the viewof Quincy hills and woods and mistyBoston skyline in the distance.

Off this high ledge we would contemplate a swan dive.

I would visualize the dive’s steep arc,poise myself for the tremulous heightthen launch a winged swan into shining waters . . .

I now sometimes recall such events, memoriesthat stay with you.

Those youthful swan dives seemed to hintat impulses toward transcendence, the moonlit pools to reflectsomething tumultuous and Divine.

—Joseph Kent

Before dawn, at the sea

The press of night releases, retreats the dark and dense.Above, the call from skyey space; ah, the secret opens.Captured, I stop and wait approaching alchemy, all open to birth.Now glide pearly masses on moving water;clouds come for morning’s opal drink.God, what glory anthem!

Against the line of new horizon no sun is seenbut inside my skin its push, its rise is felt.Breathing, seeing, my sheath expandsI lift and slide into sky’s openings beyond these gauzy veils.

On either side of wideness, fading edges stretchsilver on liquid, as paintbrush strokes lay wandering lights,

bright on darkest blue or rosey graydark on light and light on dark – both do inward seal the day.

Direct, the frontal waves curl sharp and clear and cleanyes, pale with light, and greenpouring, pouring, come to me;in them and through I amgliding and shining the frothy filigreelace stories entwined in ebb and flowreluctant to part, to be written on sand;a mystic language left to tell of travel’s end.

While sailing behind in the western sky, still creamy but faintwho saw the mute full moon send its adieu,a soft salute to dawn in the east?

Then slumbering swan of the sky awakeswith satin exhale to cheek and lips, my face,caress of curves outside to in, and, oh, the same!

I enter the center, soar above,companions of long: slow pulse of Love.Above the air we sail secure,warm, in unknown tongue of understandingto the space beyond, far away!O Beauty!O Divine.

—Navaja Llope

September

September, that glorious monthOf warm temperate sunshine,Opened her days of felicity,Her spacious, peaceful cadences,Along the banks of a mountain stream.She lay in sylvan solitudeFramed in willow and towering pine,And boulders heaped upon the shores,And above, majestic blue and sun.The rushing of water over rocksCommingled with the murmuring pools’Tones of mystical enchantment.How rare that release into timeless wonder!The press of cares, the half-done deedsWeigh upon the breast, stifle the soulThat slowly, hardly, struggles to emerge.

Now, O radiant Splendor, Come!Flow down in the wide white spaces,


Fill the golden day with thy Presence.Whistle thy flute upon the boughs aboveAnd thrill the senses with thy sweet embrace.Into the moments pass before too lateThy eternal calm, thy nameless delight.Hurry, before the shadows fall,Enter into the tumbling brook,Into the soft and fragrant air,Here, into the gray stone, penetrate.

—Larry Seidlitz

Perch fishing

What is ordinary trembles,what is regular quakes.Years bend onrattling the plates,feet a little surereach missing step.What waited cold past snowcomes to a permanent start.Out folds of a faultwe hope a way along,stained gull-ridge back,huge grey-green rock.Out to catch five yellowtide peak fed perchthick pouched pelicans fetch,we let go both polesa moment and watch,after wave claps,the blinding mist.With what swift strokes doyou mortally surround me,cover my eyespacific, abatethe pull of the hooked,the reeling worldthen pound troth into faith.Soul’s angel,one you raisedfrom the livinglong agohas left these linesto rock you even noweach lash on our face,the soundall the strongerfor our strange past.

—Rick Lipschutz

When I look at Her

when I look at Her,She smiles at me,from her womb silencing—lovable eternal heart.my mind’s unending questsnares the sprinklingperfume of muskfrom Her shining eyes.I hold tightlyher lotus feet,full with petalsof eternal love.where the vastness of seaanchors the boat of tide,night is no more vastbefore the awakening dawn,in the skies of east.to cheer the world of natureShe flew the streamsof the sunlit path,where darkness takescomplete restin the platinum house.native to stars and the moon,I travelled across the universeholding her wings of fire and peace.I arrive in air and water,and my thought’s paradisetouches the sky,when I look at Her.

—Manas Pati

Trust the dream

Auroville is working,Trust the Dream—Slowly openingAs a lily in subeamWhite and pureFrom mud insecure—Stress at every seam.Come, hold handsAnd lift this dreamOf Truth Supreme.

—Chandresh Patel


AproposIt is your destiny to see, to know as Godknows, to feel as God feels. —MeisterEckhart

Life is a perpetual choice between truthand falsehood, light and darkness,progress and regression, the ascent to-wards the heights or a fall into the abyss.It is for each one to choose freely. —TheMother.

Come and be Love’s willing slave, forLove’s slavery will save you. Forsake theslavery of this world and take up Love’ssweet service. The free, the world en-slaves, but to slaves Love grants freedom.—Rumi

God and I have become like two giant fatpeople living in a tiny boat. We keepbumping into each and laughing. —Hafiz

Everything I see, hear, touch, feel, taste,speak, think, imagine, is completing a per-fect circle that God has drawn. —MeisterEckhart

Do not say, “It is morning,” and dismiss itwith a name of yesterday. See it for the firsttime as a new-born child that has no name.—Rabindranath Tagore

I have no object to defend for all is ofequal value to me. I cannot lose anythingin this place of abundance I found. Ifsomething my heart cherishes is takenaway, I just say, “Lord, what happened?”and a hundred more appear. —St. Cathe-rine of Siena

Divine Love is not something ethereal,cold and far, but a love absolutely intense,intimate and full of unity, closeness andrapture using all the nature for its expres-sion. —Sri Aurobindo

Divine love will be eternally true to its ownbeing, and its being is giving all it can, atthe perfect moment. —Meister Eckhart

We all have a role to fulfill, a work to ac-complish, a place which we alone can oc-cupy. —The Mother

I found completeness when each breathbegan to silently say the name of my Lord.—St. Teresa of Avila

How long will grown men and women inthis world keep drawing in their coloringbooks an image of God that makes themsad? —Meister Eckhart

Wisdom is so kind and wise that whereveryou may look you can learn somethingabout God. —St. Catherine of Siena

The conquest of difficulties make up allthat is valuable in the earth’s history. —Sri Aurobindo

Know the true nature of your Beloved. InHis loving eyes your every thought, word,and movement is always, always beautiful.—Hafiz

Commerce is supported by keeping the in-dividual at odds with himself and others,by making us want more then we need, andoffering credit to buy what refined sensesdo not want. —Meister Eckhart

Everyone has a life appropriate to his totaldevelopment, everyone has experienceswhich help him in his total development,and everyone has difficulties which help inhis total realization. —The Mother

All beings are words of God, His music,His art. —Meister Eckhart

Each object in the universe is really thewhole universe in a different frontal ap-pearance —Sri Aurobindo

It is not possible for Love to not hear us,and whatever happens the perfect teacherstaged. —St. Catherine of Siena

They can be a great help—words. Theycan become the spirit’s hands and lift andcaress you. —Meister Eckhart

The minute one stops going forward, onefalls back. The moment one is satisfied andno longer aspires, one begins to die. —The Mother

Man is a born child, his power is the powerof growth. —Rabindranath Tagore

What percent of space is this earth in theinfinite realm? What percent of time is onesecond in eternity? Less than that is ourknowledge of God. How then can we everargue about Him? —Meister Eckhart

Like water in jar and river are in essence thesame, you and spirit are the same. Yourevery idol prostrates before you, your ev-ery thought-form perishes in your form-lessness. —Rumi

To everyone who suffers, perseverancebrings good fortune, The Prophet has saidthat each prostation of prayer is a knockon heaven’s door. When anyone contin-ues to knock, felicity shows its smilingface. —Rumi

A thousand souls hear His call every sec-ond, but most every one then looks intotheir life’s mirror and says, “I am not wor-thy to leave this sadness.” —St. Teresa ofAvila

That which oppresses me, is it my soultrying to come out in the open, or the soulof the world knocking at my heart for itsentrance? —Rabindranath Tagore

To see the divine possibility and overcomeits play of obstacles constitutes the wholemystery and greatness of human exist-ence. —Sri Aurobindo

If you are irritated by every rub, how willyour mirror be polished? —Rumi

You have been put upon earth, in a physi-cal body, with a definite aim, which is tomake this body as conscious as possible,make it the most perfect and most con-scious instrument of the Divine. —TheMother