What is in you right now?
Every feeling is a road. Let the mirror read you, or touch a lamp yourself.
or touch a lamp yourself
वाणी · the Mother and Sri Aurobindo
Nine pages from the Mother's diary, one at each lamp. Each lamp's hymn ends in its page, read in silence; here they can be read at any time.
- रौद्र · AngryThe Mother · November 21, 1914
- भयानक · AfraidThe Mother · December 3, 1912
- करुण · SadThe Mother · February 2, 1914
- बीभत्स · AshamedThe Mother · March 19, 1914
- शृङ्गार · CravingThe Mother · January 23, 1917
- वीर · RestlessThe Mother · July 8, 1914
- हास्य · AmusedThe Mother · May 17, 1914
- अद्भुत · OverwhelmedThe Mother · July 4, 1914
- शान्त · NumbThe Mother · December 7, 1912
- दुर्गा स्तोत्र · Sri Aurobindo's hymn to DurgāThe hymn of the lamp of courage, वीर.
Why this
Whatever is here is the material. Nothing on these pages asks it to leave. Each state is given its place, and a sitting made for it.
Bharata, in the Nāṭyaśāstra, says how a state becomes rasa: vibhāvānubhāvavyabhicārisaṃyogād rasaniṣpattiḥ. In Ghosh's English, the Sentiment is produced from a combination of Determinants, Consequents and Transitory States (VI, the prose after verse 31; Ghosh vol. 1, p. 105).
Bharata wrote for an actor and an audience. Here you are both: the stage is your own body, the audience is yourself, and all of it is turned toward God. That turn is ours, not Bharata's.
Eight of the lamps are Bharata's eight rasas, each in the colour he gives it (VI.42 to 43). The ninth, śānta, is not in his text, so its colour is ours. None of them is a wrong answer.
Each path names the ways of bhakti it really contains, from Prahlāda's nine in Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 7.5.23. That every rasa can be turned toward God is Rūpa Gosvāmī's teaching, in his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu.
In the Bhāgavatam (7.1.31 to 32) Nārada tells Yudhiṣṭhira that the gopīs came to Kṛṣṇa by desire, Kaṃsa by fear, Śiśupāla and the other kings by hatred, the Vṛṣṇis by kinship, the Pāṇḍavas by affection and the sages by devotion; so let the mind be set on Him by any means at all. No feeling is the wrong road.