The ‘Bharat Nivas Chronicles’ has been long in coming! Like all chronicles, time is needed to gather experience and to string it together. This is our first volume. We hope to bring out others as we have something to offer. Whether in the form of prose or poetry, graphics or art productions... to share our experience of this journey. A journey that began with The Mother when she started the building of Bharat Nivas, the Pavilion of India, in 1970, in the International Zone of Auroville. She did so, saying that true unity exists only at the ‘spiritual’ level and India is the only country that has an unbroken continuity of spiritual life. As the steps of the journey take us into the endless vistas of the future, we seek to share some of them through these volumes.
Our world today abounds in the creation of new sciences, disciplines and processes… to keep pace with the changes taking place in our lives. We explore the sky and the stars, we seek to further unravel the secrets of Nature, to evolve the structures of life. But, even as we do so, the complexity of problems we face becomes increasingly more intractable. A ‘core’ process seems to be missing .. it still eludes us! Though our awareness of it grows.. as our need for discovering it and making it an essential part of our life. Our life..as conscious beings.. in the full richness of our potentialities is not revealed to us. We develop the ‘external’ field in which our lives unfold – but know not the treasures that lie within is, which give meaning to all the rest. This ‘key science’ awaits its hour of discovery and practice. But its ‘presence’ is palpable in the lives of men the world over. There is the need to re-create our being itself –to sound its greatest depths and farthest heights and to move with ease in the realms of the Spirit.. and the domains of matter. And..to discover that the two make one ‘Whole’ of Existence. To live this plenitude of being..in the physical universe itself.. is our irresistible pole of attraction. Sharing the journey…helps us move ahead with an assured step. We present here a few key texts that mark the steps of this journey…and guide us on the way.
A world lies in the hollow of our palm – small and cracked in its glass shell. We look at the pieces – and try to put them together, whichever old way! And the pieces don’t fit – they just remain as pieces. We juggle with them, we play with them, but nothing really happens. And, sometimes, we wonder if there isn’t another way – because this one doesn’t work. Quite as simple as that. ... As this millennium prepares to move into the next one, glimpses of that other way come to us. We sense ‘another’ world, throbbing and palpable to the touch, warm and lightly golden in hue – not just waiting ‘to be’ but already there. Beneath the cracked surface... A world that is ‘whole’. Not to be constructed with pieces – but self-existent as a ‘whole’. A contained unity, that radiates its glow in soft rays all around it. It is another ‘texture’ of matter, of a way ‘to be’ – malleable, with a soft, pliable consistency. Not density as we know it. Another ‘quality’ of substance. This already exists – it is THERE. In our being itself – behind the world that lies cracked in the hollow of the hand. To sense this ‘substance’ – and to create afresh a new being of man, another form and raiment of him .... another world. Not the old ‘put together’ is the way of the future. But to receive the impress of the new...
Sri Aurobindo | 2004
“Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind. The sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning, and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, – that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities. She was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces…
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