Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested

SABDA - Sri Aurobindo and World Literature Goutam Ghosal

This book is "another effort to show how Sri Aurobindo may be studied with reference to the great Western writers, most of whom are romantics in a special sense." These short comparative essays "seek to clarify the Western tradition behind Sri Aurobindo who is returning again to the West, after a hundred years, not just through his philosophy, but also through his poetics...". The comparative studies cover a wide range of Western poets such as Blake, Wilde, Emerson, Poe, Baudelaire, Petrarch among others.

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To Strive... to Seek... to Find

Bijoya Sen Gupta

But never to yield... that’s what makes human beings transcend their mortality. In sadhana as in business, a sincere aspiration and a commitment to a larger vision is what makes ordinary man evolve into Ubermench... ask Somerset Maugham

Many many years ago, as a young school girl, I read a wonderful story by Somerset Maugham. It was called The Lotus Eater. It was about a man called Thomas Wilson who decided to place his dream, of a carefree life in the beautiful island of Capri, so well within his reach that in the end it destroyed his character. And turned him into a vegetable.

The story, a modern parable of sorts, has stayed with me ever since. Lotus eating is probably the most debilitating disability that plagues us - as much in business as in our personal lives and in sadhana. [...]

Tata’s vision in business is in many ways an echo of the kind of education that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have spoken about, on one occasion the Mother says, “An aimless life is always a miserable life. Every one of you should have an aim. But do not forget that on the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life. Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others.”

For the sadhak, that aim is a sincere aspiration, a call to the divine consciousness. For the enlightened entrepreneur it is a commitment to his vision. But ultimately it’s the search that makes man what he is. Forever aiming and aspiring for something bigger than himself. It’s what Alfred Tennyson talked about in his poem Ulysses... “to strive, to seek, to find but not to yield.”

The author, a Kolkata-based freelance writer is on the editorial board of Fourth Dimension Inc

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