Word: pondich
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...paintings of Renoir. But even as a child Mira Alfassa had had mystical experiences, and the Paris salon she commanded was a circle of devotees of the occult. In 1914 she visited India with her second husband, French Diplomat and Writer Paul Richard. In the French colonial city of Pondichéry, Richard introduced her to the Indian visionary Sri Aurobindo, a former revolutionary turned mystic. She immediately became Aurobindo's disciple. "His presence," she wrote in her diary, "is enough to prove that... darkness shall be transformed into light...
...Richards returned to Pondichéry. Paul later went back to France, but Mira stayed. Aurobindo pronounced her "the Divine Mother," his spiritual partner in leading mankind toward a new consciousness. When Aurobindo retired into near-hermitic seclusion in 1926, Mira took over the direction of his ashram-the community of devotees that had grown up around him in Pondichéry. Six years his junior, she continued propagating his doctrine that man was on the threshold of a new phase of evolution toward perfection...
Aurobindo died at the age of 78 in 1950, but the Mother remained vigorous into her 90s. In recent years, she supervised the still-unfinished construction of a dream of her own: Auroville, a Utopian international community near Pondichéry that is planned for 50,000 residents. The Sri Aurobindo Society, which she founded in 1960 to coordinate the activities of the ashram and Auroville, now has centers in 23 countries, including eleven...
...late Sri Aurobindo of Pondichéry, India, who died in 1950 at the age of 78, taught a different kind of integral yoga. Departing from the usual teaching of yoga, which speaks in terms of freeing the spirit from domination by the body, Aurobindo stressed perfecting the body by bringing the spirit more completely into it. Rather than looking toward an escape from the cycle of existence, he envisioned a this-worldly utopia of new consciousness. "It is the descent of the new consciousness that is the stamp and seal of my discipline," he wrote. Like Teilhard de Chardin...
Today Aurobindo's teaching-which comprises 30 volumes in English-is being studied at ten centers across the U.S. and has its own thriving laboratory in the Aurobindo ashram in Pondichéry, as well as a new international community, Auroville, being built near by. Run today by a 94-year-old French mystic known as "The Mother," both are attracting the growing number of Americans who travel to India on a spiritual search...