Mirror of Tomorrow—The Human Aspiration
The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and... his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation... is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity [with its] victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

Sri Aurobindo

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Our Vision
It will be the endeavour to seek and express all that ennobles the human spirit in its quest towards perfection, towards truth and beauty and joy and sweetness and love, towards fulfilment of the sense of immortality present in its deeper soul, its ceaseless aspiration for the higher manifestation even in the material creation. The Mirror shall reflect and reflect upon things of tomorrow, bring closer the human destinies by approaching the future as much as by beckoning the future to enter into its thousand possibilities.

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Thy memory, like the unfixed legends of old time,
May as a dulcimer the listening ears assail
And weary them, and a mystic fellowship prevail
And link to it everlastingly my haughty rhyme,

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What is meant here is the Divine in its essential manifestation which reveals itself to us as Light and Consciousness, Power, Love and Beauty. But in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in Itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient—the Inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this universe—or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat. The Ignorance which is the characteristic of our mind and life is the result of this origin in the Inconscience. Moreover, in the evolution out of inconscient existence there rise up naturally powers and beings which are interested in the maintenance of all negations of the Divine, error and unconsciousness, pain, suffering, obscurity, death, weakness, illness, disharmony, evil. Hence the perversion of the manifestation here, its inability to reveal the true essence of the Divine. Yet in this very base of this evolution all that is divine is there involved and pressing to evolve, Light, Consciousness, Power, Perfection, Beauty, Love. For in the Inconscient itself and behind the perversions of the Ignorance the Divine Consciousness lies concealed and works and must more and more appear, throwing off in the end its disguises. That is why it is said that the world is called to express the Divine.

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Mirror of Tomorrow is moving to a new platform from 29 March 2012.

The management of the site will transition over to the Sri Aurobindo Yoga Foundation of North America (SAYFNA) and its team will take care of it in every respect. I am very grateful to the Yoga Foundation for coming forward enthusiastically and I must in fact congratulate them wholeheartedly.

The new MoT site will be an interim step towards a more robust web-portal. In course of time it will have a broader scope with a larger coverage of topics and issues taking, as Sri Aurobindo would call, "the Yoga view" of things as far as it is possible for us. The idea is to have a spiritual-cultural-social-educational-scientific-technological-environmental-health-educational forum for different kinds of activities. If we have to describe it in a single phrase, it could be Applied Spirituality in Life. With the basis and the sense of commitment it has, I am sure, it will be a great success.

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Is it enough to let oneself be filled with That, is there nothing else to do?

I think, I think that it is the only thing. I am repeating always: “What Thou willest, what Thou willest, what Thou willest... let it be what Thou willest, may I do what Thou willest, may I be conscious of what Thou willest.”

And also: “Without Thee it is death; with Thee it is life.” By “death” I do not mean physical death—it may be so; it may be that now if I lost the contact, that would be the end, but it is impossible! I have the feeling that it is ... that I am That—with all the obstructions that the present consciousness may still have, that's all.

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Nature is a shrine where vista'd gloom enhances
Whispering tongues that speak from every column—
Whereto man fares through serried forests solemn
Of symbols that scan him with their intimate glances.

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Past this wearying bulk of undelight
That cumbers all our mist-enfolded world,
Happy the one who with limber wings unfurled
Voyages to peace and lovely lawns of light;

He who his thoughts, like larks with quivering wings,
At each day's dawn for heavenward flight unpens,
Who soars o'er life and effortlessly kens
The hidden speech of flowers and all dumb things.

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The luminous prospects of the Poetry of the Spirit as proposed by Sri Aurobindo had to be realised in practice. It was towards this end that not only did he write himself seizing “the absolute in shapes that pass”; he also encouraged actively and occult-yogically his disciples who came forward to participate in such an apocalyptic adventure. They invoked heaven’s light in their inner chambers and called for the deep mystic fire from the recesses of the being to take form of the intensely expressive and intuitive word. And the Aurobindonian Muse was born, Ahana of the Eternal. A new dawn has appeared on the poetic horizon. The present set of poems convincingly and vividly tells us of this birth that took place, now more than seventy years ago.

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Give me not only gold,
But the use unwasted
Of each grain of splendour
My dazzled eyes behold—
Or be Thy nectar-cup untasted,
O Heavenly Lender.

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Its beginnings were laid in a very humble manner in Bengal in the minds of some of its greatest thinkers who first dreamt of it and tried to translate their dream into reality by founding special institutions where the youth of the country would be trained as devoted workers for achieving that end. One of the most important of such institutions was what was aptly named Dawn Society to indicate its objective of ushering in the dawn of India’s Freedom. It was founded by Satis Chandra Mukherjee of revered memory as far back as the year 1902.

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There is an equally scathing attack regarding the ādesh-episode,—the command received by Sri Aurobindo directing him to go to the French territory, he recognising it always as imperative in character. The impression that the Divine Command was prompted by a human agent, rather than the other way around, as has been suggested by a presumptuous historian, Peter Heehs, has been convincingly dismissed by Amal Kiran. The arrogant intellect of the author had the impertinence to maintain that an objective researcher in his pursuit is not obliged to go by supernatural factors even while dealing with the Mystics and Yogis, and that in its strictness there is nothing like a command without human instrumentality entering into picture.

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Though a sickle-blade in the harvest hour
Reap all the stars away,
And the gleaner maid of dawn shall leave
The stark bare field of day.

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I have come to the windless place,
To the high rock set
In the midst of the tedious valley
Where the embrangled joys and sorrows race
And will nowise let
Fulfilling and intendment tally.

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Quite interestingly, I am following all these experiences of Savitri. The experience of those different joys, I was surprised to have it a few days ago; I said to myself, "Strange, why am I made to see the joy in all those things: the joy of destroying, the joy of creating, the joy of laboring and conquering, and all of it?" I was very surprised, and then …

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The scene is the sedition trial of Bal Gangadhar Tilak in Bombay, on Wednesday 22 July 1908, 10 pm. Tilak was convicted and was to be lodged in Mandalay Jail in Burma (Myanmar). The pronouncement of justice Davar was almost a forgone conclusion, though not perhaps the severity of the sentence. Thousands had gathered outside the court anxiously waiting for the verdict. There were heavy showers of July at times but nothing deterred them. Mounted policemen were placed in the entire area to control the crowd. They decided to take him outside the court premises from the back door.

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How shall heart's waters lure
Thee to my shrine?—
"Be stillness and candle-pure
Vigil thine."

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The Story of Savitri is a story of two journeys. One is a journey that climbs greater and greater heights; it is an upward journey, a vertical journey on the ascending slopes of Heaven; it goes from sky to higher and more luminous sky and the climb is ceaseless, rising to loftier bluer skies, all the way up to the Transcendental; it reaches the Land of Infinity, the Land of the supreme creative Force in all her splendour.

The other journey is a deepening journey; it plunges into the occult vigour and strength, into the fearsome depths of the darkness, depths that are not hypothetical, that are not imaginary. They are brute and material, they are real in their negative role, they are harsh in cheerless implications. This journey enters the Chasm of Death, the inconscient Gorge which is the source of all dark antagonism.

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Water softly swirling
In sea cave,
Shadowlessly furling
Tainture of the grave,
Utterly revealing
The strewn pearl.

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The silken web of the moon
Is fallen on the sea:
Silence bereaved set free
An old and a new tune.

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