High School Reunion

The formally educated world splits into two kinds: those who love school reunions and those who loathe them. The emotional gulf between these points of view cannot be easily bridged or forded. The naysayers deride the pointless nostalgia and the overwrought sentimentality for a time when, in reality, they were crude, zit-faced versions of the far more impressive people they would ultimately grow into. They have “moved on” in life and their few attachments to the past are marginalized to the realm of rarely accessed memory.

I am firmly in the other camp. I think school reunions are wonderful fun.

I find it entertaining and inspiring to see the interesting, valuable lives former friends and acquaintances have made for themselves. While I’m not particularly good about staying in touch with old colleagues, it is nonetheless satisfying to catch-up every once-in-a-while.

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Room Darshan

Today is known as “Golden Day” at the Sri Arobindo Ashram.

On this day in 1956, Sri Aurobindo’s lieutenant and chief disciple, the Mother, had an occult vision of the next phase of human development. Sri Aurobindo described this as the transcendence from the conscious mind to the supramental state, in which one understands themselves to be a part of the completeness of existence, which he called “the divine.” He’s how she described her experience:

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.

As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that “the time has come”, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.

On special days, like Golden Day, the rooms of the Ashram which belonged to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are open to devotees, who take advanced appointments and queue for hours for the chance to spend five minutes walking through the private spaces, and among the relics, of the two people they consider their ultimate teachers. Today, we were gifted two passes for “room darshan.”