Margaret Woodrow Wilson was given the name of Nishtha by Sri Aurobindo

from Anurag Banerjee <anuragbanerjee2002@yahoo.co.in> to tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com
date 23 November 2008 18:11 subject Biography of Nishtha

Nishtha
By
Anurag Banerjee

Hers is a story of faith; of aspiration and complete surrender at the Feet of the One whose writings had kindled her latent seeking of the Unknown. She has been defined as “mysterious”; she was the eldest daughter of one of the most influential and powerful persons of the world and was good-looking and elegant and admired by many; yet she kept behind her past, her family and friends for the sake of the One on whom she had unshakeable and impregnable faith. And she herself was the embodiment of faith. She is Margaret Woodrow Wilson who was given the name of Nishtha by Sri Aurobindo...

In 1936, Margaret came across Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita in the New York City Public Library. She sat down in the main reading room of the library and became so engrossed that she lost sense of time and a guard had to tell her that the library was closing. She returned on the following day and by the time she had finished reading the book, she realized that she had found her path, her ‘missing aim’ which she had been searching throughout her life and above all, her Guru. She wrote to Sri Aurobindo and expressed her wish to practise the Integral Yoga and asked him the nature of the discipline followed to convert ‘mental seeking into a living spiritual experience’. Sri Aurobindo wrote a long letter to her in September 1936 which is quoted below:

“To find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life, it is the one thing indispensable and all the rest is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him,—that is, first of all to transform one’s own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the infinite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss to become that in one’s essential nature and, as a consequence, to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one’s active nature. [...] [12:45 PM]