Thursday, March 11, 2010

How about rewriting the opening chapter of The Life Divine

India's Jewish Mother by Michelle Goldberg Tablet Magazine A New ...
How Mirra Alfassa went from being a French bohemian to an Indian goddess India's (Jewish) Mother Tablet Magazine
Mirra Alfassa in Pondicherry circa 1969. They’re of an old woman with hooded eyes and a cryptic closed-mouth smile who looks a bit like Hannah Arendt. Everyone refers to her as “The Mother,” but she was born Mirra Alfassa. The de facto goddess of this town is a Sephardic Jew from France
In the center of the community, both geographically and physically, is a massive spherical gold-plated structure called the Matmandir, or Temple of the Mother. According to Mirra, it is the “symbol of the Divine’s answer to man’s aspiration for perfection.” It looks like some sort of UFO and leaves one agog at Mirra’s spiritual audacity.
She wasn’t the first Jew who sought to remake the world into a place where ethnic and nationalist categories were obsolete. And Auroville, which Mirra imagined as a futuristic city of 50,000 that would transform the world, has obviously fallen short of that goal. Living there, with its strange combination of anarchism and cultish orthodoxy, would probably be a nightmare. Still, its very existence in this obscure, murderously hot place has a touch of the miraculous about it. Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.
KairosFocus: 1 Chron 12:32 report, 60: Towards Industrial ... By Gordon
(I think we in the Caribbean should look at marrying that with the Auroville Earth Institute of India's Auram, which makes a wide variety of bricks, blocks and tiles, including an interlocking range.) In short, we are seeing the early ...
Sri Aurobindo’s Marriage—a discussion by Raman Reddy pertaining to a few aspects in context of the latest biography published by the Columbia University Press. Comment posted by: RY Deshpande
I’d written an article presenting some of these ideas related with Savitri, though in a somewhat different manner, and given for publication in the Ashram’s monthly Mother India. I’ve not heard anything about it in spite of a lapse of a few years, and one or two soft queries. It will therefore a vain and frustrating hope if the present article by Raman Reddy will at all be published by this monthly.
Comment posted by: RY Deshpande
It prompts me to make a suggestion, following Kepler’s line of argument about “engaging contemporary intellectual culture”. How about rewriting the opening chapter of The Life Divine as an example of such an engagement, when we know that it was written almost a hundred years ago? Let’s see to what extent it will make an appeal to the contemporary intellect.
Comment posted by: Anonymous
The only rational and sensible solution seems to be this: If Sri Aurobindo has written something himself, just restore it… If something can be done to restore the original 1951  and 1954 editions (the ones the Mother read from when she did her work with Huta) that would be just enough. Isn't that what the Mother wanted? How can the ashram contemplate otherwise? Research on savitri can continue, all versions made available at the archives. Research doesn't have to mean revising the poem. It is hard to digest that someone as gifted as Amal Kiran could have agreed to adopt such naive methods...

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