 I'll welcome everybody Okay, okay. I'm no fan here Yeah, well for me no fan for other people they can see Welcome everybody We're here to honor Sri Aurobindo We're here to honor his realizations of nirvana and cosmic consciousness Last year on August 15th of 2021 We began the year leading up to 150th birth centenary of Sri Aurobindo And now everyone is talking about Sri Aurobindo everywhere in India People are speaking about him and the great things that he's done The more we learn about him The more our hearts are hushed with respect and love And really deep gratitude But we'll never know the full depth and scope of his accomplishments He said that no one would ever know the inner man that he was But we're immensely fortunate to know what he has written about himself He wrote about himself as part of the great work that he did The work that he did for us so we can follow the pathway that he created for mankind to evolve more quickly The best way to honor Sri Aurobindo is to do what he wanted us to do To follow the path he created to work for our own yogic accomplishments and One way to do this is to open ourselves to the consciousness that he put into his writings So instead of talking about what he wrote I'm going to be reading what he wrote So that we hear his teachings and we receive the consciousness that he put into those writings for us to get It's much better to hear his words than to use our words and As part of this We're going to honor him for the great work that he did for his beloved country of India and Then the work that he did and continues to do for the whole world Sri Aurobindo wrote about himself in Savitri when he wrote about King Ashwapati Savitri's father The King's story starts with book one canto three The yoga of the King the yoga of the soul's release In this part of Savitri, he tells us that even before he began his yoga He knew where he came from and he knew what he came here to do This is what he first wrote about himself His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres into our province of a femoral site a colonist from immortality a Pointing beam on earth's uncertain roads His birth held up a symbol and a sign his human self Like a translucent cloak Covered the all wise who leads the unseeing world Affiliated to cosmic space and time and paying here God's debt to earth and men a greater sonship was his divine right a Power was in him from the unknowable His soul lived as eternity's delegate His mind was like a fire a sailing heaven His will a hunter in the trails of light This is his own description of himself before he began his yoga And we have another description of him before he began his yoga It was written by a man who lived with him This was in 1898 through 1900 and this fellow came to teach Sri Aurobindo how to speak Bengali This is what he wrote Sri Aurobindo's laughter was like a child's simple liquid and soft an Inflexible will was visible in the set of his lips But there was not the least force of worldly ambition or ordinary human selfishness in his heart There was only a longing rare even among the gods To give himself in order to relieve others suffering as I became acquainted with him Living with him day and night. I realized that Aurobindo was not of this world He was a God fallen from heaven by some curse As long as I lived with him and observed him he was absorbed in his studies Sensitive to the suffering of others and always self-sacrificing like a Sanyasana a renunciate It seemed that he had made a vow to devote his life to the acquisition of knowledge Even in the midst of the hustle bustle of this world. He was immersed in intense tapasya Spiritual effort in order to fulfill this vow The students of Baroda looked upon Aurobindo as a God And we've just read that Shri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri about himself His mind was like a fire a sailing heaven his will was a hunter in the trails of light So he has described his own abilities to acquire knowledge The known history of his life is filled with praises from everybody His teachers praised his scholarship his co-workers praised his work and his character His students praised his teaching and his personality But the time Shri Aurobindo began to have disciples They didn't have enough praises or enough words to praise him to describe his greatness All this leads us to believe that Shri Aurobindo was a highly developed person all of his life It's no wonder that the known history of his yogic Realizations shows us a person who advanced very quickly on the path once he decided to start He was born in Bengal, India on August 15th 1872 He was educated in England from the age of 12 and at the young age of 17. He vowed He was going to free his country He returned to India three years later to work in the Indian Civil Service in 1893 but his first interest his primary interest was to free India and He began his revolutionary activity within six months after he came back He himself said he was not interested in yoga Because he didn't want to become the kind of yogi who gives up his life in the world This is another sign of Shri Aurobindo's innate wisdom Later he taught that a fully realized yogi must also be successful in any area of life He must do this in order to serve the divine and That this was a necessary part of his yoga and indeed a necessary part of human life This truth was part of the ancient Vedic teachings These teachings are the basis of Indian spiritual philosophy and yoga But it had been lost to modern India and Shri Aurobindo brought it back for the world Now people interested in yoga practice often hear those two terms Nirvana and cosmic consciousness They are told that a spiritual seeker should work to attain these two states of consciousness But they also find that it takes many years of hard work and in fact many do not attain them even after a lifetime of work Shri Aurobindo attained nirvana after three days of yogic practice After that it took only four months for cosmic consciousness to begin to emerge in him He told some of his disciples how he realized nirvana and then he described the actual experience in some letters His nirvana experience came in January of 1908 With the yogi named Vishnubhashkar Lele He told his disciples. I didn't begin with Lele. I first began on my own with pranayama Drawing the breath into my head This gave me good health lightness and an increased power of thinking Side by side certain experiences also came but not many Nor important ones. I began to see things in the subtle Then I had to give it up when I took to politics. I Wanted to resume my sadhana, but I didn't know how to begin again. I Wanted spiritual experience and political action together. I would not take up a method that required me to give up action in life When I came to Baroda from the Surat Congress My brother Baran wrote to me that he knew a certain yogi whom he would introduce me to at Baroda Baran sent a wire to Lele and Lele came On the top floor in a room. We were shut up for three days He asked me to do nothing but throw away all thoughts that came into my mind In three days. I did it. We sat in meditation together. I realized the silent Brahman consciousness Sure, you're a vendor described this experience a little more fully in a letter. He wrote Lele said sit in meditation, but do not think only look at your mind You will see thoughts coming into it Before they can enter throw them away from you until your mind is capable of entire silence. I Had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into the mind from outside But I did not think of either questioning the truth or the possibility. I Simply sat down and did it In a moment My mind became silent as windless air on a high mountain summit and Then I saw a thought and then another Coming in a concrete way from outside. I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain and In three days, I was free from that moment In principle the mental being in me became a free intelligence a Universal mind not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought or a laborer in a thought factory but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and Free to choose what it willed in this vast site empire and thought empire Giving a personal mental form to the thought stuff from the environmental nature force However, she her Mendo says that it took some time for the fullness of this to completely develop In another letter he wrote For of course the later fullest development of this new untrammeled mental power took time many years Then soon after this Shri Yoramindo had to address a large public gathering. It was on January 19th 1908 his mind was completely silent Lely told him to make namaskar to bow to the audience and Wait and speech would come to him from other sources than the mind Shri Yoramindo followed Lely's advice. He said in fact speech came and That ever since then all thought all speech all writing Came to him from that same source above the brain mind Furthermore, he said that after this experience the yoga was going on in him all the time even in outward action These other yogic achievements are not small developments. They take years to fully achieve Shri Yoramindo doesn't quite say it this way But it certainly looks like he got these major yogic attainments in one day soon after he realized nirvana Not only that he wasn't even looking for them Later he taught that these achievements are only one step in the system of the yoga practice that he gave to the world In the practice of Shri Yoramindo's yoga The second major stage to achieve is to receive the impetus of our movements from above First we realize our soul and our psychic being is sufficiently formed Our consciousness settles in our heart We are guided more and more by our soul consciousness Then the next step is that our consciousness also takes its place above the head over the highest chakra in the body Instead of being guided by our imperfect misleading mind or The different parts of our imperfect misleading vital being we are guided both by our soul and by the higher consciousness above us Lele taught Shri Yoramindo these yogic methods, but Lele did not remain in his life as his guru Lele himself said that he was made by a voice within him to turn Shri Yoramindo over to the divine within him So he asked Shri Yoramindo Whether he could surrender entirely to the inner guide within him and move as it moved him If so, he would need no instructions from Lele or from anybody else Shri Yoramindo wrote that he accepted this and he made it the rule of his sadhana and of his life Shri Yoramindo believed that he was here to free India And at that time his whole life was devoted to it In his greatness he was the perfect instrument for the divine to use for this work And then when he took his part in this work to free India Did his work and that work was finished The divine took him on to do the work of freeing all of humanity These were Shri Yoramindo's aspirations In response, the divine put him where he could most quickly have the experiences and receive the inner guidance that he needed in order to fulfill both of these aspects of his own destiny Shri Yoramindo was moved by the divine for his spiritual evolution and for the spiritual evolution of the world On May 2nd, 1908, at the height of Shri Yoramindo's revolutionary activity Without prior warning or any knowledge Shri Yoramindo was suddenly arrested on a charge of conspiracy and taken to the local jail He was moved to the Alapur jail on May 5th And he was kept in solitary confinement for one solid year He was released exactly one year later on May 6th, 1909 Later he said that the inner voice which he had accepted as his guide told him that his Revolutionary activity had to be stopped He had to concentrate on his spiritual development But he was so attached to freeing his beloved country that he refused to listen So the great power which was guiding his destiny put him in jail for one year Shri Yoramindo wrote about all this and he wrote about what it did for him he said The year of 1908 Friday 1st of May Nor did I know at that time that this day would mark the end of a chapter in my life And that there stretched before me a year's imprisonment Though I had described it as imprisonment for a year It was in effect like a year's seclusion in an ashram or a hermitage Finally the compassionate Sarvamangalam Shri Hari the all-good Lord brought me to a yoga ashram and He himself stayed as guru and that's tiny sadhana kutir that seat of spiritual discipline This yoga ashram happened to be the British prison The British government's wrath had but one significant outcome. I Found God in Shri Yoramindo's book tales of prison life He wrote in detail about the really terrible physical mental and emotional tortures Coming from the horrible Horrible inhumane conditions of his solitary confinement in the Alapur jail It's is really distressing to hear that any human being should have to go through this But when Shri Yoramindo wrote about them he wrote about them with a fine ironic sense of humor It was hard for him to go through it at first But each torture became a direct pathway to a significant spiritual experience Finally his inner work and the resulting spiritual attainments were so great that he wrote Although it cannot be said of suffering that there was none The period on the whole passed in self-existent bliss He wrote about some of the circumstances of his God realization Because he described what he called the necessary Vessens that God gave him in jail. He wrote Then I did not know that God was having a game with me Through which he was giving me a few necessary lessons First he showed me the state of mind in which prisoners condemned to solitary cells move towards insanity and He wholly turned me against the inhuman cruelty of the Western prison administration So that I might to the best of my ability Turn my countrymen and the world from these barbarous ways to the path of more humane prison organization This was the first lesson. I Also understood his second purpose It was to reveal and expose before my mind its own weakness so that I might get rid of this weakness forever For one who seeks the yogic state crowd and solitude should mean the same Indeed the weakness dropped off within a very few days and Now it seems that the mental poise would not be disturbed even by 20 years of solitude in The disposition of the all-good even out of evil cometh good The third purpose was to give was to give me this lesson That my yoga practices would not be done by personal effort but that a spirit of faith or reverence and a complete self-surrender were the road to attain perfection in yoga and Whatever power or realization the Lord would give out of his benignity to accept and Utilize these should be the only aim of my yogic endeavor Since the day when the deep darkness of ignorance began to lessen I Started to see the true nature of the all-good Lord's amazing infinite goodness As I watched the different events in the prison ward. I Was troubled by mental listlessness I spent a few days in agony in this manner One afternoon as I was thinking Streams of thought began to flow endlessly and then suddenly these grew so uncontrolled and Incoherent that I could feel the mind's regulating power was about to cease Afterwards when I came back to myself I Could recollect that though the power of mental control had ceased the intelligence was not self-lost Nor did it deviate for a moment But it was as if the intelligence was watching quietly this marvelous phenomena But at that time Shaking with the terror of being overcome by insanity. I had not been able to notice that I Called upon God with eagerness and intensity and I prayed to him to prevent my loss of intelligence That very moment they're spread over my being such a gentle and cooling breeze the heated brain became relaxed easy and Supremely blissful such as in all my life. I have never known before Just as a child sleeps secure and without fear on the lap of his mother So I remained on the lap of the world mother From that day all of my troubles in the prison were over It was for this realization that God had brought about this situation or experience Without turning me mad He had enacted in my mind the gradual process towards insanity That takes place in solitary confinement He kept my intelligence as the unmoved spectator of the entire drama out of this came strength and I had an excess of kindness and sympathy for the victims of human cruelty and torture I also realized the extraordinary power and efficacy of prayer Shri Yorobindo was put into an outward physical solitary confinement Inside he was living in a state of sheer emptiness His description of this interstate is a treasure It's a treasure for any seeker Because people can have similar experiences, but they may not know their yogic value Fortunately for us he described his interstate of nirvana He described it in detail in a long letter of 1934 He wrote Now to reach nirvana was the first radical result of my own yoga It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought Unstained by any mental or vital movement There was no ego No real world Only when one looked through the immobile sense something Perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms Materialized shadows without true substance There was no one or many even only just absolutely that featureless relationless sheer indescribable unthinkable absolute yet supremely real and solely real This was no mental realization Nor something glimpsed somewhere above No abstraction. It was positive the only positive reality although Not a spatial physical world It was a positive reality pervading occupying or rather flooding and drowning dissemblance of a physical world Leaving no room or space for any reality, but itself Allowing nothing else to seem actual positive or substantial. I Cannot say there was anything exhilarating or rapturous in the experience as it then came to me The ineffable Ananda the bliss I had years afterwards But what it brought was an inexpressible piece a stupendous silence an infinity of release and freedom I Lived in that nirvana day and night Before it began to admit other things into itself or modify itself at all and The inner heart of experience a constant memory of it and its power to return Remained until in the end it began to disappear into a greater super consciousness from above but meanwhile realization added itself to realization and fixed itself with this original experience at An early stage the aspect of an illusionary world Gave place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon With an immense divine reality behind it and a supreme divine reality above it and An intense divine reality in the heart of everything that had seemed only a cinematic shape or shadow Shri Aurobindo has a footnote here Explaining what he meant by illusion He says in fact it is not an illusion in this sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness But it is a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying use of manifested existence Then he goes on about the world which replaced the illusionary world He says and this was no re-imprisoning in the senses This was no diminution or fall from supreme experience It came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the truth It was it was the spirit that saw objects not the senses And the peace the silence the freedom in infinity Remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless Eternity of the divine Nirvana was Shri Aurobindo's interstate when he was put into solitary confinement Wherever he found himself must have been planned and orchestrated by God Today when we look back at the history of his life We can see a pattern of yogic realization emerging in clear steps and stages We can also see how every detail was carefully arranged for his swift spiritual progress The prison doctor Came regularly to Shri Aurobindo solitary cell to ask him questions At one point the doctor managed to get permission for Shri Aurobindo to walk outside of his cell So that he could have some much needed exercise During these walks, they're awakened in Shri Aurobindo the deep the tender the all encompassing love that everyone who had his darshan felt in his presence He wrote about how his nature changed into love for everything during his walks He wrote, I would take a stroll every day in the morning and in the evening in the open space above the decree The decrees were the rooms for the special punishment of solitary confinement in the jail There were six decrees in the Alapur jail On one side were the jail industries on the other the cowshed My independent kingdom was flanked by these two From the industrial section to the cowshed from the cowshed to the industrial section Traveling to and fro I would recite the deeply moving, ageless, powerful mantras of the Upanishads Or, watching the movements and activities of the prisoner I tried to realize the basic truths of the imminent Godhead, God in every form In the trees, the houses, the walls, in man, animals, birds, metal, the earth With the help of the mantra, all this is the Brahman, Sarvam Kalvidham Brahma I would try to fix or impose that realization on all of these As I went on doing like this, sometimes the prison ceased to appear to be a prison at all The high walls, those iron bars, the white wall, the green-leaved trees shining in the sunlight It seemed as if these commonplace objects were not unconscious at all But were vibrating with a universal consciousness They loved me and they wished to embrace me, or so I felt Men, cows, ants, birds, are moving, flying, singing, speaking Yet all this is nature's play And behind all this is a great pure detached spirit wrapped in a serene delight Once in a while, it seemed as if God himself was standing under the tree To play upon his flute of delight, and with his sheer charm to draw my very soul out Always it seemed that someone was embracing me, holding me on his lap The manifestation of these emotions overpowered my whole body and mind A pure and wide peace reigned everywhere It's impossible to describe that The hard cover of my life opened up And a spring of love for all creatures gushed from within Along with this love, such satvic pure and high emotions As charity, kindness, ahimsa, harmlessness, etc Overpowered my dominantly majestic act of nature And found an abundant release And the more these qualities developed, the greater the delight And the deeper the sense of an unclouded peace The anxiety over the case had vanished from the beginning Now it was a contrary emotion that found room in my mind God is all good He has brought me into the peace He has brought me into the prison house for my good My release and the quashing of the charge was certain I grew firm in this faith After this for many days, I didn't have to suffer any troubles in the jail We can see that in a few months Shri Aurobindo was put through everything that he needed For most of the realizations that he says will come to us If we practice his system of yoga How can anybody honor him enough for going through everything that he went through To learn the quickest road to realization that humanity has ever had And can we honor him enough for the dedication of his life to do all of this for us We can try to summarize his progress in the jail He saw the true nature of the all good Lord's infinite goodness He knew that whatever comes to him in life is for his good And for his progress and for the progress of the whole creation He learned that complete faith in God and surrender to God Were the road to attain perfection in yoga Moreover, he did not only learn it as intellectual knowledge He attained this exalted state which never left him He realized that the aim of his yoga was to accept whatever power or realization God gave him and used them in a life dedicated to God's service He saw the imperfect nature of mind's workings to such an extent That he was liberated from being controlled by his mind The high psychic soul qualities like love and kindness Like compassion and faith and wisdom All these took over the areas of his being that were not so developed And replaced any lower qualities of the anger and vital that he still had left Therefore he was living in soul consciousness He gained universal compassion He gained love for everything in the creation And he gained the realization that all of the creation is God's love And God's delight of being And within all of this Cosmic consciousness was beginning to emerge in Sri Aurobindo Later he wrote that by mid 1909 Soon after he was released from jail He had already realized in full two of the four great realizations On which his yoga philosophy and his yoga are founded The first one was the Brahman The silent the silent Brahman His nirvana attainment And the second realization was of the cosmic consciousness and the divine as all beings And all of this is the active dynamic Brahman These came in full when he was jailed Besides these two great attainments He was already on his way to the other two great realizations During his meditations in the Aleppo jail He wrote that the other two realizations Are the realization of the supreme reality With both the static Brahman and the dynamic Brahman as its two aspects And then the realization of the higher planes of consciousness leading to the super mind Sri Aurobindo wrote two poems while he was in jail One is a poem speaking only about the physical world The world that we all know He didn't wait to begin his wider work for the whole world Alone there Imprisoned Solitary He wrote to us He wrote to call us to join him on the path of consciousness that he was traveling on He called his poem invitation Here is his poem calling to everyone who's ready Invitation With wind and the weather beating around me Up to the hill and more land I go Who will come with me Who will climb with me Wading through the brook and tramp through the snow Not in the petty circle of cities Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell Over me God is blue in the welcome Against me the wind and the storms rebel I sport with solitude here in my regions Of misadventure have made me a friend Who would live largely Who would live freely Here to the windswept uplands ascend I am the lord of Tempest and Mountain I am the spirit of freedom and pride Stark must he be An akincement to danger Who shares my kingdom and walks by my side Anybody who is doing the yoga Who has accepted Shri Aurobindo's invitation Can tell you how very real and true this poem is The other poem that he wrote in jail Comes from a consciousness that we can only marvel at It takes us out of our mundane plane of physical existence To a place that we can even hardly imagine This poem is called Who It is a poem of Shri Aurobindo's God Realization It has eleven verses But I'm just going to read the first and the last Who In the blue of the sky In the green of the forest Who is this hand that has painted the glow When the winds were asleep In the womb of the ether Who was it roused them And bade them to blow It is he in the sun who was ageless and deathless And into the midnight his shadow was thrown When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness He was seated within it immense and alone Shri Aurobindo did not write letters to explain His realizations of cosmic consciousness He didn't speak in the personal way about this In the way he wrote his letters about nirvana But one of the places he wrote in beautiful detail about this realization Is when he wrote about Savitri's yoga And he explains cosmic consciousness in other books Like the life divine and the synthesis of yoga We can find more on the subject in his letters on yoga We can find them in his letters to guide the early ashramites yoga practice When they had some experiences of cosmic consciousness He does not write that he is speaking about himself But we can look at these writings as his own descriptions of what happened to him And how they changed his life In the life divine he wrote The being breaks out of his imprisonment He breaks out of the imprisonment in a separated individuality He becomes universal He assumes cosmic consciousness in which it identifies itself with the spirit and the self The life, the mind, the body of all things and all beings In the letter to an ashramite he wrote Cosmic consciousness is an experience in which one's separate personal existence Shut up in a body ceases to be the normal thing One feels the body as a point or small thing in a vast existence consciousness or ananda That is the divine And one feels oneself as spread out in that vast consciousness As if the world were within us and not we inside the world Or as if the world were one with us and one with the divine For our yoga this is a beginning only Not the end as it is in the ordinary yoga A liberation not the sidhi And Shri Aurobindo has a definition of sidhi It means fulfillment success perfection Shri Aurobindo described his full state of cosmic consciousness When he wrote about Savitri's cosmic consciousness This is in the best is in the book of yoga It's in Kanto 7 the discovery of the cosmic spirit and the cosmic consciousness For Savitri it was the final result of her yogic preparation to face death To bring her beloved husband back so that they could work for the divine on earth This was the most important thing in her life For Shri Aurobindo the most important thing in his life Was to save his country to bring his country back for its divine work in the world And here is what he wrote about himself as Savitri And he's telling us the stages of cosmic consciousness that he went through A spirit a being saw created things and cast itself into unnumbered forms And was what it saw and made All now became an evidence of one stupendous truth A truth in which negation had no place A being and a living consciousness a stark and absolute reality It was herself it was the self of all It was the reality of existing things It was the consciousness of all that lived and felt and saw It was timelessness and time It was the bliss of formlessness and form It was all love and the one beloved's arms It was sight and thought in one all-seeing mind It was joy of being on the peaks of God She passed beyond time and slipped into eternity Her being rose into unreachable heights and found no end of its journey in the self It plunged into the unfathomable deeps and found no end to the silent mystery That held all world within one lonely breast Yet harbored all creation's multitudes Her spirit saw the world as living God It saw the one and knew that it was he All nature's happenings were events in her The heartbeats of the cosmos were her own She inhabited the vastness of the world Its distances were her nature's boundaries Its closenesses her own life's intimacies She was a single being yet all things She was space and the dreams of God in time From this she rose where time and space were not The superconscient was her native air The superconscient was her native air Infinity was her movement's natural space Eternity looked out from her on time All of these writings give us quite a good idea About the change of Sri Aurobindo's consciousness into cosmic consciousness One could ask whether he already had a certain amount of this Because of his complete dedication to selfless service and the liberation of India Since he hasn't written about it we can only speculate He returned to his political activity as soon as he was released from jail He was now living in a state of nirvana and cosmic consciousness And we can see that it was not just Sri Aurobindo the human being Leading the national movement to free India It was a supreme divine creator of the universe in a human body It's a very clear example for us of a human being serving the divine And acting according to the divine will When he was released he was the only leader of the revolution against the British Who was not either in jail or in exile For 10 months he ran the whole revolutionary movement single-handed In this condition of complete silence Receiving high realizations and guidance from above When he was in jail the inner voice of the guide which he followed Told him to go forth and take what was shown him in jail to the people One of the first things he did was to have his book tales of prison life Published in 1909 and 1910 in the Calcutta and Lanzli journals Suprabhat And Suprabhat means dawn on May 30th, 1909 21 days after Sri Aurobindo was released from jail He was asked to give his first public speech It was at Uttarpara He knew that he was the only man left of the great revolutionaries who could lead his nation to freedom He had prepared what he would say But he couldn't say it His Uttarpara speech is deeply moving. It's profoundly touching We already know something about him by learning of the circumstances and the realizations God gave him in jail In the parts of his speech that I'm going to read We hear his greatness And we feel the great heart of this great man Speaking his love and dedication to the whole of his beloved country He began his speech by saying As I sat here There came into my mind a word that I have to speak to you A word that I have to speak to the whole of the Indian nation It was spoken first to myself in jail And I have come out of jail to speak it to my people It was more than a year ago that I came here last When I went to jail, the whole country was alive with the cry of Bhande Mataram Honor to Mother India Alive with the hope of a nation The hope of millions of men who had risen out of degradation When I came out of jail, I listened for that cry But there was instead a silence But one thing I knew That as it was the almighty power of God who had raised that cry that hope So it was the same power which had sent down that silence I knew I would come out The year of detention was meant only for a year of seclusion and of training How could anyone hold me in jail longer than was necessary for God's purpose He had given me a word to speak And a work to do And until that word was spoken I knew that no human power could hush me Until that work was done No human power could stop God's instrument However weak that instrument could be or however small Now that I have come out Even in these few moments A word has been suggested to me Which I had no wish to speak The thing I had in my mind He has thrown from it And what I speak is under an impulse and a compulsion Sri Aurobindo told the people of the great experiences and realizations That God gave him while he was jailed And then he said God said to me I have another thing for you to do And it is for that that I have brought you here To teach you what you could not learn for yourself And to train you for my work Then he placed the Gita in my hands His strength entered into me And I was able to do the sadhana of the Gita I realized what the Hindu religion meant This is the Dharma That for the salvation of humanity Was cherished in the seclusion of this peninsula From of old It is to give this religion that India is rising She does not rise as other countries do For self or when she is strong to trample on the weak She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world India has always existed for humanity Not for herself And it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great After seeing this After seeing this Sri Aurobindo told the people how God showed him that he was in everything And everyone in the jail In the courtroom In the judge In the lawyers Then he repeated what God said to him Now do you fear he said I am in all men And I overrule their actions and words My protection is still with you And you shall not fear This case that which is brought against you Leave it in my hands It is not for you It was not for the trial that I brought you here But for something else The case itself Is only a means for my work And nothing more Then Sri Aurobindo told the people I knew all along what he meant for me For I heard it again and again Always I listened to the voice within me I am guiding Therefore fear not Turn to your own work for which I have brought you to jail And when you come out Remember never to fear Never to hesitate Remember that it is I who am doing this Not you nor any other Therefore whatever clouds may come Whatever dangers and sufferings Whatever difficulties Whatever impossibilities There is nothing impossible Nothing difficult I am in the nation and it's uprising And I am Vasudeva I am Narayana And what I will shall be Not what others will What I choose to bring about No human power can stay I strove long for the realization of yoga And at last to some extent I had it But in what I most desired I was not satisfied Then in the seclusion of the jail Of the solitary cell I asked for it again I said Give me thy adesh Thy command I do not know what work to do Or how to do it Give me a message In the communion of yoga Two messages came The first message said I have given you a work And it is to help uplift this nation Before long the time will come When you will have to go out of jail For it is not my will that this time Either you should be convicted Or that you should pass the time As others have to do in suffering for their country I have called you to work And that is the adesh for which you have asked I give you the adesh to go forth and do my work The second message came And it said Something has been shown to you in this year of seclusion Something about which you had your doubts And it is the truth of the Hindu religion It is this religion that I am raising up before the world It is this that I have perfected and developed Through the rishis, the saints, the avatars And now it is going forth to do my work among the nations I am raising up this nation to send forth my word When you go forth speak to your nation always this word That it is for the sanatanadharma that they arise It is for the world and not themselves that they arise I am giving them freedom for the service of the world When therefore it is said that India shall rise It is the sanatanadharma that shall rise When it is said that India shall be great It is the sanatanadharma that shall be great When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself It is the sanatanadharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world It is for the dharma and by the dharma that India exists When therefore it is said that India shall rise It is the sanatanadharma that shall rise What is this religion which we call sanatana, eternal It is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it But it is not circumscribed by the confines of a single country That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion Because it is the universal religion which embraces all others It is the one religion which impresses upon mankind the closeness of God to us And embraces in its compass every means by which man can approach God It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth Which all religions acknowledge that he is in all men and all things And that in him we move and have our being It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe the truth But to realize it in every part of our being Then Sri Aurobindo said to the people This is the word that has been put into my mouth to speak to you today What I intended to speak has been put away from me And beyond what is given me I have nothing more to say It is only the word that is put into me that I can speak to you That word is now finished This Hindu nation was born with the sanatanadharma With it it moves and with it it grows When the sanatanadharma declines, then the nation declines And if the sanatanadharma were capable of perishing With the sanatanadharma it would perish The sanatanadharma, that is nationalism This is the message that I speak to you We can see that all of Sri Aurobindo's yoga Sri Aurobindo's yoga is a sanatanadharma He's just described it And we can see that bringing his yoga to the world is the God given work that he was given And in these words we can feel the greatness of Sri Aurobindo's heart And the greatness of his being As part of his work to free India Two days later his Uttar Parva speech was published in the Bengali And English newspaper in Calcutta Then Sri Aurobindo revised this text and published it in his own weekly journal The Karma Yoga in June of 1909 It was brought out as a pamphlet in 1919 And has been republished many times since then After his speech at Uttar Parva Sri Aurobindo addressed more than 12 meetings in Bengal, East Bengal and Assam As many as 2,000 people attended these meetings People who were there reported that even though 2,000 people were sitting there When Sri Aurobindo spoke there was a complete silence We can imagine that those 12 speeches were just as moving and just as powerful as his Uttar Parva speech To continue his work he started 2 weekly publications One in English called the Karma Yoga And one in Bengali called the Dharma All of this was done in his condition of the complete silence of Nirvana And the vast fullness and receptivity of cosmic consciousness The way he wrote about the British government And the Indian situation And everybody was just as powerful and moving In his writings, in his publications As the way he gave his Uttar Parva speech When you read them you can see it His goal was to awaken his people He wrote with intelligence, he wrote with clear common sense And he was direct and honest in his criticisms of everyone If 2,000 people were there to hear Sri Aurobindo speak at one time We can imagine that thousands more wanted to read what he wrote At that time High officials in the British government Considered Sri Aurobindo to be the most dangerous adversary to the British rule Who was still at liberty to act And we can understand exactly why They were hoping to jail him again And they were looking for the opportunity to arrest him 1909 and 1910 Early 1910 Was a period when revolutionaries belonging to various groups in the country Carried out several spectacular assassinations The British government decided to clamp down harshly on any nationalist activity It brought in harsh laws Including the Indian Press Act Which effectively forbade the free expression of opinion In the press and on the public platform This raises a question We know that the British were hoping to arrest Sri Aurobindo Were the laws restricting free speech in the press And on the public platform Particularly planned and designed So that the British government could arrest Sri Aurobindo again His work against the British rule had always been in his published writings and his public speeches And now he was doing nothing but writing and public speaking On February 12th of 1910 The Advocate General of Bengal gave his opinion That the government had a good chance of success If it chose to prosecute Sri Aurobindo On the charge of sedition For an open letter to the people Which he had published in the Karma Yogan On December 25th 1909 The British wanted to clamp down harshly on any activity of the nationalist party And this letter called to the nationalist party It exhorted it It called it It said the time is now To rise to reform itself and to act strongly again The Lieutenant Governor's office began to prepare the case against Sri Aurobindo We can ask another question here We know that by now everything Sri Aurobindo wrote and said was given to him from above Was this letter and all the events that followed Were they planned and orchestrated by his divine guide To bring him to the next stage of his work for us A member of the Karma Yogan and Dharma staff Had a relative who worked in the police department One evening in February 1910 This staff member appeared in the midst of a gathering at Sri Aurobindo's house With the news that the British government was going to arrest Sri Aurobindo again Everything was ready, he said And it might be that very evening Sri Aurobindo seemed to think for a few seconds Then he said I shall go to Chandranagore Just now This very moment He stood up and he left the house Within a short time he was in a small boat Moving down the Ganges River Later he wrote in a letter I suddenly received a command from above and a voice well known to me Go to Chandranagore In ten minutes or so I was in the boat for Chandranagore Thus Sri Aurobindo started on the first stage Of the journey which was to end in Pondicherry on April 4th, 1910 There he followed his inner guidance To concentrate on his spiritual development And to do his work for us His work for the whole world We have a rare written account Of a foreign visitor's experience Of what both Sri Aurobindo and mother were like Just before Sri Aurobindo left his body He had been doing his work in Pondicherry for 40 years He left on December 5th, 1950 The visitor was there for his last darshan on November 24th, 1950 This is what she wrote At last it was the morning of November 24th At Golconda rumors flew Although thousands had now arrived for this darshan It was said that Sri Aurobindo was ill And might find it impossible to appear Then at the last minute we were told that he was well enough A long line led from the main building around the block People of every color Every style of dress Government officials High ranking professors Young and old from dozens of countries Wanted to see the philosopher's sage Each of us finally climbed the stairs To the floor where, at the end of a long narrow room Sri Aurobindo in white And the mother in a gold sari Sat side by side upon a slightly raised platform As a westerner The idea of merely passing by these two With nothing being said Had struck me as a bit ridiculous I was still unfamiliar with the Hindu idea That such a silent meeting Could afford an intensely spiritual impetus I watched as I came up in line And I noted that the procedure was to stand quietly Before the two of them for a few silent moments Then to move on at a gesture from Sri Aurobindo What happened next was completely unexpected As I stepped into a radius of about four feet There was a sensation as if moving into some kind of a force field Intuitively I knew it was the force of love But not what ordinary human beings usually mean by the term These two were geared straight up, so to say They were not paying attention to me As ordinary parents might have done Yet this unattachment seemed just the thing that healed Suddenly I loved them both as spiritual parents Then all thought ceased I was perfectly aware of where I was It was not hypnotism as one Stanford friend later suggested It was simply that during those few minutes My mind became utterly still It seemed that I stood there a very long and uncounted time For there was no time Only many years later did I describe this experience As my having experienced the timeless in time When there at the Darshan There was not the least doubt in my mind That I had met two people who had experienced what they claimed They were Gnostic beings They had realized this new consciousness Which Sri Aurobindo called the Supramental Only someone who was had the same realizations as Sri Aurobindo Could find the right words to honor him For his achievements of nirvana and cosmic consciousness And what words of ours are good enough To honor him for all that he did for India And for all that his work continues to do for the whole world This honor is too deep for our outward words of praise We honor him with our hearts and with our souls And we can end this tribute to honor Sri Aurobindo in his own words With a poem that he wrote right after he had these great realizations He wrote this poem in 1909 When he was still leading the movement against the British rule He wrote about himself and what he had become And he called his poem Reminiscence Reminiscence My soul arose at dawn And listening heard one voice abroad A solitary bird A song not master of its note A cry that persevered into eternity My soul leaned out into the dawn To hear in the world's solitude its winged compere And hearkening what the angel had to say Saw luster in midnight And a secret day was open to it It beheld the stars born from a thought And knew how being prepares Then I remembered how I awoke from sleep And made the skies built earth Formed ocean deep If any of you people have a question I can answer it I guess there are no questions Oh thank you Yes, yes I'll tell you what Let me email it to you Okay Because I haven't written just to search through the papers Yeah Okay send me an email to remind you And I'll send you the exit page number and everything Yes sir How to activate inner guide? Oh what a great question Is there anything written How to activate the inner guide I can't say that I've ever read those words Like mother saying activate the inner guide by doing this I think you have to ask for it I think you have to I mean the yoga is a triple labor of aspiration rejection and surrender And we know that it's the consciousness The full consciousness and the inner guide That is doing everything and leading us and calling us So ask for it to come That's my personal advice I'm sorry I don't have a quotation for you Yes sir Yes sir You have Tell me Uh missions of those objectives have been given like cosmic consciousness we have Described that to uh two three places Yes So your dindo has written Yes We have used nirvana and number of places Yes And we have not used moksh Liberation, moksh Liberation No I haven't three or didn't didn't write the words moksh So I was reading what he wrote Yes, sir I I agree with you I I my understanding from what mother and shura binda has said Is that nirvana especially from the buddhist side of things Is the liberation and it's the liberation out of this existence And you you attain nirvana you get that high emptiness that vastness and it's finished You have got that and shri arabinda's teachings is that that's only halfway there So that's not liberation The liberation is the full complete consciousness when you get that that's the silent brahman Then the other half is the active brahman which is the cosmic consciousness Where the action the whole brahman acts through you in the world So you are free but you're not free to run away You are free to become a full complete divine instrument Okay, I will answer the question He shri arad the question is what is evolution has shri arad bindo defined evolution Shri arad bindo has said first I will define involution The supreme divine all consciousness decided to become all of this In order to do that he had to become less and less conscious in stages To become the complete unconsciousness of physical matter of things So the supreme is involved in our matter Evolution is the supreme becoming himself again for the delight of doing all this In all these levels and in us that's why we do the yoga That consciousness that we eventually have is we are conscious of the supreme all consciousness that we are At the moment we're not But doing the work is is we could call evolution fast forward We're speeding up our evolution to gain that full consciousness and again It is not moksha unless you define moksha as complete action with the divine Acting in us and through us harmony through conflict I'm sorry. I haven't read anything like that. So I can't answer your question Okay, guys, thank you all for coming It's it's it's it's been sir, it's being it's being live streamed. You can hear it again If you go to the orville radio website You will find that it's there and then you can listen to it as many times as you want You just get someone to help you find the orville radio website