Date: January 3, 2026
Venue: Matriniketan, Pondicherry
As part of the residential programme organized by Uditam: Institute for Integral Healing, Sri Aurobindo Society, Dr. Beloo Mehra, Director, BhāratShakti, was invited to facilitate a group discussion session on Thursday, January 3, 2026. For her session, Dr. Mehra focused on the topic – Human Love and Spiritual Seeking.
Dr. Mehra began the session by sharing a story about Ulaskar Dutt, a revolutionary freedom fighter, who was arrested by the British colonial rulers in the same Alipore Bomb case as Sri Aurobindo; he was a close associate of Barindra Ghosh. The story highlighted both his love for the nation and his love for Leela, the daughter of another great revolutionary freedom fighter, Bipin Chandra Pal. The story exemplified the deeper dimensions of love as reflected in human relationships, love for the nation and how an impersonal love can connect us to the deeper dimension of love as a force that sustains everything.
To further build upon this understanding, Dr. Mehra briefly narrated how the Mother discusses the story of creation and the significance of Love – Divine’s Love for the Manifestation – plunging itself into Inconscience for the purpose of evolution. Through an interactive approach, implications of this story for our individual evolutionary progress in life and for the larger evolutionary processes at the universal level were briefly discussed.
Dr. Mehra also pointed out that according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, love is one of the great universal forces which exists by itself and its movement is free and independent of the objects in which and through which it manifests. Furthermore, this force of love manifests wherever it finds a possibility for manifestation, wherever there is receptivity, wherever there is some opening for it. So our effort should be on understanding how to prepare ourselves as a receptacle for the force of love. What are the distortions that corrupt this force of love because of human egoism and the lower vital nature and instincts and impulses?
She also spoke about how Sri Aurobindo speaks of the triple harmony of love, wisdom and strength. Recounting a letter of Sri Aurobindo Dr. Mehra also briefly discussed the triune nature of the energy of love – sensual, emotional and spiritual. This led to some interesting discussions with the participants as the group explored its implications for different types of human relationships.
Some of the interactions also brought in additional questions regarding how we conceive the Divine and how that is related to our understanding of our human relationships as well as the place of love in life and spiritual path. Towards the end of the session, Dr. Mehra reminded the group that it is important to examine the nature of human love and relationships using a deeper psycho-spiritual view of human nature. Our sages and seers including the modern rishis and yogis such as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had not only explored the depths of human nature but had also raised themselves to the highest heights of consciousness. So we get a much truer understanding of things when we explore what they have seen and written from those heights of consciousness.