Dr. A.S. Dalal (Abdulhusein Suleimani Dalal), one of the foremost exponents of Yogic / Integral psychology of Sri Aurobindo reached the feet of Divine Mother today early morning. Om Shanti
His compilations "Living Within", "Looking from Within", etc., transformed thousands.
https://x.com/Shiva_Uvacha/status/2105529557621375336
Oh! Will forever remember "Living Within".
How can I forget it? That book was THE major turning point in my life alongwith another compilation from Sri Aurobindo & Mother on Love. The book that answered the burning question of my life at that time & drew me to Them.
https://x.com/RaghuveerBelur/status/2105541878120866244
Om Shanti! His compilation on The Psychic Being was one of the first books I purchased from SABDA. He made reading Their works so accessible. I'm grateful for all his work!
https://x.com/the_onlooker_/status/2105550158041932031
Dr.A S Dalal ( 100+) passed away early this morning in Ashram Nursing home. Every compilation speaks of the Mother's force arranging the topics for both the common readers and intellectuals. A great service to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother!
Dr.A S Dalal passed away today.
He was born in Tanzania in 1926, Dr. Dalal first visited Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry in 1950. He became an official ashramite in 1952.
He later went to the United States, where he pursued a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and practised psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for over two decades before permanently returning to Pondicherry in 1986.
He is widely recognized for his extensive work integrating modern clinical psychological thought with Sri Aurobindo's yogic concepts. He authored and compiled numerous famous books, such as A Greater Psychology, Our Many Selves, and Living Within. - GG
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Why leaves change color and how we become who we are – the science of chlorophyll (which is still a mystery) and the poetics of personhood (which is always a mystery)
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105521086595059907
"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance."
James Baldwin's advice on writing:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105481594957971683
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination”
Hear Mary Oliver, in her lovely time-rasped voice, read one of the greatest poems ever written:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105445091993157834
Moonlight and the magic of the unnecessary
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105389728111415450
How to be a lichen — adaptive strategies for the vulnerabilities of being human from nature’s tiny titans of resilience
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105368342638760240
How to be more alive — the samurai guide to dying every day
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105338148309938379
How not to waste your life
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105277787183476774
What happens when we die
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105158699513770368
In the autumn of 1883, a national paper reported that "an Iowa woman has spent seven years embroidering the solar system on a quilt." Ellen Harding Baker used her stunning quilt to teach astronomy in an era when women could not attend college
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105119195717333391
"Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so."
René Magritte on the courage of joy:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105082700751130686
#birddivination of the week. Find it among the original series of 100, along with the story and process behind them, at almanacofbirds.org
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105051273078735337
For an act of resistance to the tyranny of algorithms, try the Marginalian newsletter — undistracted notes on the search for meaning through art, science, philosophy, poetry, and various other tendrils of wonder. For 20 years, it has remained a one-woman labor of love — free, ad-free, AI-free, and fully human: themarginalian.org/newsletter
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105027335011348746
When a young friend was dangerously dancing with the darkness, Galway Kinnell wrote him this poem. It saved his life.
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2105005960842321923
C.S. Lewis on how to structure the days of a creative life and train the receptive imagination
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104975759404114290
There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there.
Wonder, like enchantment, is not something you can control or plan for or will — it is something that befalls you, overcomes you, pours upon you spontaneous and unbidden. Paradoxically, what makes such spontaneity possible is structure — an organizing principle for the hours of the day that makes room, and reserves it, for these moments of magic. This is not simple to configure and not easy to enact: How to spend our hours and shape our days may be the supreme problem of human life. There is no permanent, perfect, or universal solution, for the problem is laced with our particularity — but we can learn from each other, borrow bits and pieces from various approaches, constellate a singular organizing principle from different points of light.
Among the finest I have encountered, in being both pragmatic and profound, is the one C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) offers in his memoir Surprised by Joy (public library).
https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/09/29/c-s-lewis-schedule/
How to have enough – Wendell Berry on creativity and love
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104796311413264858
A #birddivination for the long horizons of love. See more and the story behind them at almanacofbirds.org
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104756821428699299
“Q: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A: Reading.” David Bowie answers the Proust Questionnaire
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104720317260152958
Nick Cave on the two pillars of a meaningful life
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104664952808133064
Orcas and the price of consciousness – lessons in love and loss from Earth's most successful and creative hunter
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104643582858612808
Bertrand Russell, who lived nearly a century through two world wars and received the Nobel Prize, on the secret of happiness
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104613370422866332
"In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious)."
George Saunders on how to love the world more themarginalian.org/2023/04/09/geo…
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104577370912948413
There Was a Shadow – a lyrical illustrated celebration of the changing light, in the world and in the inner world
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104553025872244755
Your life will thank you for this: How to live and how to die
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104433923962937573
How to stop waiting and start living – a classic jolt from Henry James (to be revisited approximately once a month for best results, in my experience)
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104394437048541519
The weasel and the meaning of it all – Annie Dillard on how to live
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104326473934881250
If you feel like you are waiting to start living, this catalytic poem is for you:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104302559133417521
You know it. The pleasure of being left alone
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104281197010473245
Hermann Hesse on discovering the soul beneath the self and the key to finding peace
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104250978983690343
At the link, the best of The Marginalian this week in one place – how to speak forest, a field guide to falling in love better, and a live celebration of wonder: mailchi.mp/themarginalian…
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104214988374081846
Romanticizing intertwined trees as "embracing" is a lovely metaphor, but it might obscure the actual competitive biology underneath. Is the goal wonder or accuracy?
https://x.com/sophiadusk1/status/2104238881738727510
Nietzsche on how to find yourself and the true purpose of education
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104190585791746228
Thin Slices of Anxiety – an illustrated meditation on what it's like to live enslaved by worry and how to break free
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104071536088887762
How to handle a narcissistic and abusive parent – Kafka's remarkable letter to his father
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2104032029415293025
Nature is always listening — the wondrous science of how mushrooms respond to music
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103995535887593719
Auden on writing, enchantment, belief vs. doubt, and the most important principle of creative work
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103964089617678765
Albert Camus on how to live whole in a broken world
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103940172165337527
How to speak forest
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103918794687000775
On change and denial:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103888598311272520
The pain in you and the God in you – Carl Jung on the relationship between psychological suffering and creativity
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103852597811580988
The 100 milliseconds between you and the world – Oliver Sacks on perception
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103828213134741549
Nobel laureate Elias Canetti on grieving a parent, grieving the world, and what makes life worth living
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103709149183815754
"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life." Nietzsche on how to find yourself:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103669648650575915
There is always an abyss between us, between one consciousness and another, but there is also a light in the abyss that can change us
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103633148051333263
Love anyway
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103601711080198529
The donkey and the meaning of life
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103577784597533044
James Baldwin on love, the illusion of choice, and the paradox of freedom
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103556403881292251
The building blocks of intimacy – bell hooks on language and desire
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103490206569546118
How to fall in love better – a field guide to enlightened enchantment
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103465864016142627
Meet the woman who mapped Labrador and revolutionized the literature of exploration
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103346759212630065
Emerson on how to trust yourself and what solitude really means
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103307255491817919
Poetic ecology and the biology of wonder
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103270761964118372
Your life, lived – some of the finest advice on the art of growing older
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103239310233227403
A Stoic's key to peace of mind – Seneca's timeless antidote to anxiety
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103215395704316406
The 3 elements of the good life
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103194021342376034
Robert Louis Stevenson on falling in love and loving beyond the fall
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103148727766483058
How to be a poet – Elizabeth Alexander on the yin-yang of connection and contradiction
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2103127825083478362
John Coltrane, born 100 years ago today, on creativity, perseverance against rejection, and how hardship fuels art
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102908377156268129
"There was perfect trust between us, a source of joy to me, and it must have been a comfort to him. Perhaps birds understand more than we think." What a blackbird taught a lonely man about friendship
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102876947885834350
Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, on the meaning of life
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102853013140275657
"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance."
Baldwin's timeless advice on writing:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102831640158277909
How to hold the darkness – notes on living through uncertainty
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102801481992699968
James Baldwin on the relationship between creativity and integrity
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102765432214114521
Autumn Light – Pico Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence and luminosity in loss
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102741087223746976
A beginning, not a decline – Colette on the splendor of autumn and the autumn of life
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102621983284314411
A recipe for thriving through change. Find this #birddivination among the 100 in the original deck, along with the story and process behind them, at almanacofbirds.org
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102582484340785361
Born on this day in 1711, Thomas Wright was the first to describe the spiral shape of the Milky Way and to dare imagine the existence of other galaxies. His stunning celestial art epochs ahead of astronomy:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102545984517505040
Dorothy Lathrop's dreamscapes – haunting century-old illustrations for French fairy stories by the woman who became the first artist to win the Caldecott Medal, the Nobel Prize of children's books
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102514552260739177
The science of waiting and the art of delay
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102490633147465858
Born on this day in 1791, Michael Faraday gave us the electromagnetism without which none of the modern world could function. His abiding wisdom on mental discipline and how to cure our preconceptions:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102469237251985801
Albert Camus on how to live whole in a broken world
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102439050850287640
"Words belong to each other."
Hear the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice – not what I imagined! – reading her timeless love letter to language:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102403049025159580
Random pages of found books, remixed into poems: themarginalian.org/2025/12/07/lit…
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102378693666443366
It is amazing that this exists: Hear Tolkien read from The Hobbit (published on this day in 1937) in rare audio from his first encounter with a tape recorder
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102259596639305770
James Baldwin on how to live through your darkest hour
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102220091135869416
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination”
Hear Mary Oliver, in her lovely time-rasped voice, read one of the greatest poems ever written:
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102183596458938688
The courage to be yourself – Virginia Woolf on how to hear your soul
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102152170271305933
When Einstein met Tagore – a remarkable meeting of Nobel-winning minds at the intersection of East and West, spirituality and science
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2102128233709744280
Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
