Sunday, November 29, 2009

Marion Anderson-My Lord,What A Morning



Marian Anderson (February 27, 1897 – April 8, 1993)[1] was an American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. Music critic Alan Blyth said "Her voice was a rich, vibrant contralto of intrinsic beauty."[2] Most of her singing career was spent performing in concert and recital in major music venues and with major orchestras throughout the United States and Europe between 1925-1965. Although she was offered contracts to perform roles with many important European opera companies, Anderson declined all of these, preferring to perform in concert and recital only. She did, however, perform opera arias within her concerts and recitals. She made many recordings that reflected her broad performance repertoire of everything from concert literature to lieder to opera to traditional American songs and spirituals...read more

Monday, November 23, 2009

The Awakeing Of Matter

July 28, 1961

Here is something important. Sri Aurobindo says that everything is involved down here - the mind, the vital, the supermind - and that what is involved evolves. But if everything is involved, including the supermind, what is the need for a 'descent'? Can't things evolve by themselves?

Ah! He has explained this somewhere.

But I don't remember seeing anything that satisfied me.

Isn't it in the Essays on the Gita ? He explains what Krishna says and how the two [descent and evolution] are combined. I read it not long ago because I was interested in this very question. And I even said something myself about the difference between what evolves (what emerges from this involution) and the Response from what already exists above in all its glory.

We'll have to find this passage.

There are two lines in the ancient traditions, two ways of explaining this. One says it is by the 'descent' of what already exists in all its perfection that what is involved can be awakened to consciousness and evolution. It's like the old story: when what Sri Aurobindo calls the universal Mother or the Shakti (or Sachchidananda [[Sachchidananda is the Supreme Consciousness in its triple aspect of Existence (Sat), Consciousness (Chit) and Bliss (Ananda). ]] ) realized what had happened in Matter (that is, in what had created Matter) and that this involution had led to a state of Inconscience, total unconsciousness, the ancient lore says that at once the divine Love descended straight from the Lord into Matter and began to awaken what was involved there. [277]

Other traditions speak of the Consciousness, the divine Consciousness, instead of Love. One even finds accounts full of imagery depicting a Being of prismatic light lying in deep sleep in the cave of the Inconscient; and this Descent awakens him to an activity which is still (how to put it?) inner, an immobile activity, an activity by radiation. Countless rays issue from his body and spread throughout the Inconscient, and little by little they awaken in each thing, in each atom, as it were, the aspiration to Consciousness and the beginning of evolution.

I have had this experience.

I have had the experience of being 'missioned,' so to speak, in a form of Love and Consciousness combined - divine Love in its supreme purity, divine Consciousness in its supreme purity - and emanated DIRECTLY, without passing through all the intermediate states, directly into the nethermost depths of the Inconscient. And there I had the impression of being, or rather of finding a symbolic Being in deep sleep ... so veiled that he was almost invisible. Then, at my contact, the veil seemed to be rent and, without his awakening, there was a sort of radiation spreading out.... I can still see my vision. [[See the addendum following this conversation for a transcription of Mother's vision as she noted it down for publication in Theon's Cosmic Review in 1906. ]]

(silence)

There is always what could almost be called a popular way of presenting things. Take the whole Story of the Creation, of how things have come about: it can be told as an unfolding story (this is what Theon did in a book he called The Tradition - he told the whole story in the Biblical manner, with psychological knowledge hidden in symbols and forms). There is a psychological manner of telling things and a metaphysical manner. The metaphysical, for me, is almost incomprehensible; it's uninteresting (or interesting only to minds that are made that way). An almost childish, illustrative way of telling things seems more evocative to me than any metaphysical theory (but this is a personal opinion - and of no great moment!). The psychological approach is more dynamic for transformation, and Sri Aurobindo usually adopted it. He doesn't tell us stories (I was the one who told him stories! Images are very evocative for me). [278] But if one combines the two approaches.... Actually, to be philosophical, one would have to combine the three. But I have always found the metaphysical approach ineffective; it doesn't lead to realization but only gives people the IDEA that they know, when they really know nothing at all. From the standpoint of push, of a dynamic urge towards transformation, the psychological approach is obviously the most powerful. But the other [the symbolic approach] is lovelier!

READ MORE

The Modes Of The Self

The Synthesis of Yoga

"All Life is Yoga"


Part II

THE YOGA OF INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER XI

THE MODES OF THE SELF


SINCE the Self which we come to realise by the path of knowledge is not only the reality which lies behind and supports the states and movements of our psychological being, but also that transcendent and universal Existence which has manifested itself in all the movements of the universal, the knowledge of the Self includes also the knowledge of the principles of Being, its fundamental modes and its relations with the principles of the phenomenal universe. This was what was meant by the Upanishad when it spoke of the Brahman as that which being known all is known.1 It has to be realised first as the pure principle of Existence, afterwards, says the Upanishad, its essential modes become clear to the soul which realises it. We may indeed, before realisation, try to analyse by the metaphysical reason and even understand intellectually what Being is and what the world is, but such metaphysical understanding is not the Knowledge..read more

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Blind Willie Johnson-Dark Was the Night,Cold Was The Ground

Blind Willie Johnson-The Soul Of Man

Bruce Springsteen-ReasonTo Believe




Bruce Springsteen REASON TO BELIEVE lyrics

REASON TO BELIEVE Lyrics
Seen a man standin' over a dead dog lyin' by the highway in a ditch
He's lookin' down kinda puzzled pokin' that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open he's standin' out on Highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough that dog'd get up and run
Struck me kinda funny seem kinda funny sir to me
At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe
Now Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true
She said Baby I'll work for you every day and bring my money home to you
One day he up and left her and ever since that
She waits down at the end of that dirt road for young Johnny to come back
Struck me kinda funny seemed kind of funny sir to me
How at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe
Take a baby to the river Kyle William they called him
Wash the baby in the water take away little Kyle's sin
In a whitewash shotgun shack an old man passes away
Take his body to the graveyard and over him they pray
Lord won't you tell us tell us what does it mean
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe
Congregation gathers down by the riverside
Preacher stands with his Bible groom stands waitin' for his bride
Congregation gone and the sun sets behind a weepin' willow tree
Groom stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly
Lord and he's wonderin' where can his baby be
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Invention Of the jewish People By Shlomo Sand


Book's topic

In his book Matai ve'ech humtza ha'am hayehudi?(he invention of the jewish people)..sand tries to prove that the jewsih people never existed as a nation race with a common origin,but rather is a colrful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the jewish religion.he argues that for a number of Zionists ideaologues,the mythical perception of the jews as an ancient people led to truly racist thinking..read more here

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Tuesday, November 3, 2009