Date: May 31, 2025
Venue: Matriniketan
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 on Saturday, May 31, 2025. For her session, Dr. Mehra focused on the topic – Light on Human Relationships.
After some general introductions and a brief concentration, Dr. Mehra began her session with a reading of selected lines from Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem, Savitri, from The Book of Fate. These lines throw penetrating light on the fragility of human love as reflected in a parent’s concern for the child. Dr. Mehra elaborated on this and contrasted this with the reply Savitri gives to her mother. She highlighted the Mother’s description of the eternal and divine basis of Love as a Force, and the human deformations that enter into Love which make all human ties fragile and temporary.
Using this exchange between Savitri and her mother, as shown in Sri Aurobindo’s mantric poem, Dr. Mehra shared some thoughts on how love must raise itself to the level of divine love. A question was asked about how to purify our love? This led to some discussion on shifting the basis of love from vital to psychic. The group also spent some time exploring the distortions that come into love due to our imperfect vital nature.
Dr. Mehra highlighted the significance of examining the nature of human love and relationships using a deeper psycho-spiritual view of human nature, given to us by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who had not only explored the depths of human nature but had also raised themselves to the highest heights of consciousness.
Dr. Mehra also spoke about the evolutionary time spirit and its impact on our understanding of relationships as well as our shifting dharma. In response to a question from a participant with regard to responsibility towards family, she shared a few stories from the two itihāsas which bring out different dimensions of various human relationships – conjugal, parent-child, siblings, friendship, king and public, and many more.
Some questions about the changing societal contexts also came up, which deepened the discussions and also brought in cross-cultural views on these topics. It was discussed how important it is to explore the notion of human relationships from an evolutionary perspective also. The hour-long session was appreciated by all participants.