Michael Brecher

February 5, 2002

• His book on succession in India is an exercise in objectivity as well as empirical endeavour that tries to cross into the insight that surrounds facts and events.
• Events are gross, physical, material but are always powerfully enveloped by subtle forces of smell, taste, sight, sound, touch, etc. as a flower is surrounded by its fragrance.
• To pursue the subtle forces is to have insight.  Insight leads to intuition, a direct knowledge of the object about which one is gathering empirical facts.
• Brecher's ability to visit India and gather such facts through newspapers and interviews is amazing because his study of political succession has roots in India's linguistic variation, cultural past, religions fanaticism, formative political power of democratic surface based on primitive authoritarianism.
• It is refreshing to witness that he is sensitively aware of the two sides-positive, negative-of any nascent force and is able to track the right side, not ignoring the wrong side.
• I am tempted to call it objective insight exactly resembling the constructed objectivity of Conan Doyle or Sherlock Holmes.
• He does not speak of the process he employs but it is always implied. Such a penetration is needed to appreciate "Cosmic Determinants" or the practical concept of Infinity.
• He is one fit enough to follow what the Force is doing in globalisation, particularly through computer. Suppose he can appreciate the organisation of money, he may SEE the value of a vision of progress
• Glenn Doman is a good example of a small man doing great things.
• Churchill is a great man capable of receiving the Force for the greatest accomplishment while denying freedom for India and asking why Gandhiji had not yet died.
• Rajaji who was generous, courageous, full of sacrifice, conceived of a genius scheme for education, who arrived at the same conclusions Sri Aurobindo arrived at could have a negative personality.
• Conan Doyle whose insight into life was the same as one who has a spiritual view did not come across Sri Aurobindo's writings.
• Bernard Shaw had a copy of Life Divine in his library. We know nothing of his view on Him.
• To have an endowment for something is different from exercising it.
• Any dynamic person exhausts his energies. He thus arrives at something. Surely he will have no energy to proceed further.
• The mental enlightenment classical education gives is enough to exhaust one's mental potentialities and give objective vast consideration to universal issues.
• The education of Stuart Mill completed at the age of 14 shows how little is there in the world to know, if one reaches the essence.
• In the Indian tradition, any sastra requires twelve years for mastery.
• One who has the opening in the pure mental thinking can know all that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have written in five years.
• The same thing can be given by one who has mastered in one year to another in detail or in one month in essence.
• To pass on to another the essential knowledge in essence takes one sitting which he can use to acquire the whole either in a year or half of it.
• An intellectual beginning can be consummated in a Token Act by the time the act is over whether it is in a month or a few days.