Words of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother

Sri Aurobindo was born on 15 August, 1872. Auroville Today has often published something related to Sri Aurobindo in this, his birth month, and this year we feature an article on his epic poem, Savitri, by Richard Hartz.

Bob Zwicker has worked in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives for 52 years, with particular responsibility for the Mother’s works. Recently, three new books have been published containing new material not published in the Centenary edition of The Mother’s Collected Works.

Boris Verjoutski, who passed away in April of this year, regularly contributed his observations of the natural world and human behaviour to Auroville’s weekly “News & Notes” community newsletter.

The seven volumes of The Mother’s Entretiens (Questions and Answers) are a treasure trove. They cover a wide range of topics in considerable depth, giving us a glimpse not only of Sri Aurobindo’s and The Mother’s vision of life and the future of humanity, but also providing many answers to questions on how to live one’s life and follow the spiritual path.

In 2016 a German forester, Peter Wohlleben, published a book which describes how trees exchange resources with each other through fungi on their roots.

On Saturday, 8 March, It Matters hosted a book launch event. B (Bill Sullivan) was launching his book Being which, he explained, is to prepare young children for modern life: “The new ones who are coming now really need to get the best start because the world is in crisis.

Those who have put forward the idea of a “Spiritual and Material Refresher programme” [a condition for living in Auroville mentioned in the Auroville Residents Criteria Standing Order] to be given at regular intervals to Auroville Residents have either – at worst – not read Sri Aurobindo’s works or – at best – have only read them superficially.

Some time ago, Suryamayi Clarence-Smith wrote a doctoral thesis entitled Towards a Spiritualised Society: Auroville, An Experiment in Prefigurative Utopianism.

We are used to saying that Auroville does not fit neatly into any known category. But this doesn’t stop many of us having certain fixed ideas about how it should develop.

From July 24th till August 18th, Savitri Bhavan hosted the exhibition ‘Darshan Messages’. It not only showcased the original cards from 1953 onwards, but also the evolution of the tradition of Darshan card gifting which has been stopped since January 2023.

In the February 2024 issue of Auroville Today, in the opening article titled A New World Is Born, it is mentioned that The Mother had the experience that the supramental world already existed in a permanent way on 3rd February, 1959.

The 29th February, 2024 will be the 17th ‘Golden Day’. The first one was celebrated on 29th February, 1960. An English visitor, Dick Batstone, described how the dominant colour in the Ashram compound that day was gold: Mother was dressed in gold, she stood on a gold silk cloth, her balcony was hung with golden embroidered satin, and even the flowers in the courtyard were gold.

As a child, growing up in a Hindu household in Odisha, I was always intrigued by the images of Lord Jagannath and his siblings. Like most Hindu households, an entire room was reserved for the gods, and the main icons from Hinduism’s rich pantheon of reportedly 330 million gods were prominently displayed and revered.

Dr Mohanty is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. Winner of many national and international awards, he has published extensively in the field of British, American, gender, translation, and post-colonial studies.

Last year Prisma released a second edition of their 2015 compilation on the theme of death. As its title indicates this includes the ‘death of death’, exploring Sri Aurobindo’s passing and his journey into the unconscious and Mother’s grappling with the transformation of death.

Recently, our Chairman is reported to have asked whether Auroville was not meant to take sanatana dharma to a higher level and create gnostic beings.

On February 3rd, former Indian Independence fighter and Auroville’s oldest resident Mahalingam Sangukrishna left his body, at the age of 103.

In honour of the 150th birth anniversary of Sri Aurobindo, the Science and Spirituality conference took place in the Unity Pavilion between 13-15th February.

We have grown accustomed to having a future. It’s why we have children, why we make long-term plans and investments, why we cling to the promise of unending progress.

Deepti Tewari joined Auroville 47 years ago and teaches at Last School. She is editor of the Bharat Nivas Journal. Earlier she had edited the Matrimandir Journal.

The Mother’s stay in Japan between 1916–1920 was not only of profound importance for her spiritual explorations, but might also have had a big influence upon the development of Auroville.

In reference to Caloptropis “This courage means having a taste for the supreme adventure. And this taste for supreme adventure is an aspiration – an aspiration which takes hold of you completely and flings you, without calculation and without reserve and without the possibility of withdrawal, into the great adventure of the divine discovery, the great adventure of divine meeting, the yet greater adventure of the divine realization; you throw yourself into the adventure without looking back and without asking for a single minute, “what’s going to happen?”

The Auroville Council has published draft guidelines for the publication of documents and views on the Auronet, the Intranet portal of Auroville.

“Sri Aurobindo announced that mankind will enter the subjective age, that a new civilisation is going to come where the primary thrust will be inwards,” says Shraddhavan.

It took Paulette Hadnagy twelve years to compile the material for this book from The Mother’s writings, she writes in her book announcement.

The Auro Vidya Retreat, a branch of the Pondicherry-based Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research (SACAR) directed by Dr. Ananda Reddy, was inaugurated at its location near Auroville on September 9, 2018.

“There is nothing which gives you a joy equal to that of gratitude. One hears a bird sing, sees a lovely flower, looks at a little child, observes an act of generosity, reads a beautiful sentence, looks at the setting sun, no matter what, suddenly this comes upon you, this kind of emotion – indeed so deep, so intense – that the world manifests the Divine, that there is something behind the world which is the Divine.”

“The present condition of passivity and indifference is a reaction from a former abnormal state to which he was brought by an internal effort not properly guided from without or from within.

On the evening of 29th February, Deepti Tiwari gave a much appreciated talk, the fourth and last in a series, organised by Cinema Paradiso, on the theme of consciousness which have been given by different Aurovilians.

On Auronet, Auroville’s internal internet, a clock is already counting down the days to Auroville’s 50th birthday. However, not everybody is enthusiastically awaiting what is being planned for the event.

On The Mother’s Mahasamadhi day, November 17th, Zackaria Moursi released his new compilation Anthology from The Mother in Arabic “as a humble token of his infinite gratitude and perpetual adoration to The Mother.”

“The path of later on and the road of tomorrow lead only to the castle of nothing-at-all,” is the conclusion of a small boy who, after postponing the day’s chores to tomorrow, has a nightmare which shows him the truth of never putting off till tomorrow what one could do today.

Two years ago, in its February 2013 issue, Auroville Today reported on the manifestation of the first three gardens of the Matrimandir. The Gardens of Existence and Consciousness were ready, and work on the Garden of Bliss would be completed by the end of the year.

François Gautier has lived in Auroville since 1969. He works in Pour Tous, teaches at school and assists with the childrens’ sports programme.