This initial issue launches the electronic informational and cultural quarterly, "Jyoti". The name, arising in the context of the Sri Aurobindo Center of Los Angeles, holds obvious reference to the founder of this Center, whom Sri Aurobindo had named "Jyotipriya, the lover of Light" and of whom he had said - "she will do my work in the United States". The work that Jyotipriya started in Los Angeles, of the embodiment, preservation and radiation of the world-transforming Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, continues today in a collective form, guided by the living and conscious seeds of spiritual union, which were her luminous legacy. Extending from the nexus of interweaving relationships that is the heart of the Center, this irradiance infiltrates the earth-consciousness, drawing together its multi-layered strands of the one infinite becoming. The porous stretch of this collective life is what we invoke, amplify, strengthen, extend and celebrate through the informational sections of this quarterly.

The light that is the heart of our common endeavor, rays of seeing from the solar orb that carry us integrally in our advance, are the words of the Master and the Mother. In these Words, They are concretely present, with Their liberating Knowledge and Their transforming Will. In each issue, our section called "Themes" establishes this luminous core of the jyoti, these "massed lightnings" from Their writings, pertaining to the temporal period addressed. All sincere and insightful effort adds to the universal store of learning and progress, and our assimilative efforts at translating Their Light into our collective individuality are presented in the section titled "Studies". But in the supramental guidance, Knowledge and Will are inseparable, and the sections on "Events" "People" and "News" disclose the vectors of manifesting Will at play in and around the Center during this period. Furthering themselves through the power of mutuality, which is the intimate gift of Mahalakshmi, these forces seek interaction with the wider collectivity through the listings for Sales, Services, Exchanges and Couriers under "Circulations". The reader is invited to send in his/her comments via email and to submit his/her own listings for this section. Based on reader responses, later issues will carry an additional "Letters" section. Finally, Mahasaraswati's earthier employment is presented in the section on "Projects", which outlines various works undertaken collectively as part of the burgeoning life at the Center and provides an inlook into each of their goals, requirements and states of progress, with the aim of receiving wider participation in the form of aspiration and goodwill, as well as contributions of cash or kind.

However, coming at the beginning of a year, which marks the ending of a century and a millenium, and the beginning of a new one, Jyoti pertains to a wider domain also, an illumining of the gathered karmic energies of the world-past and a measuring of their significance. It is in this respect, that it is also a cultural quarterly. The last century has been marked by the process of globalization, swiftly accelerating as the new millenium beckons, drawing the world closer than ever through cyberspace. But in the exultations of this process, let us not forget its ignoble beginnings, in colonialism and the exploitation of peoples and resources, in the capitalistic necessity of inequality and the communistic necessity of mechanical control and servitude. These beginnings are very alive today, uniformalizing the world through multi-national consumerism and maintaining vast inequalities and enforced subjections in third and fourth world nations. In this ending of a century, let us gather these evils into our concentration and offer them too to the Transforming Power, for the significance of globalization is not exhausted by them. Behind these works a greater Intent, more active now than ever, which will use the efforts of the past millenium as its scaffolding only, if even that. A World-Intelligence focussing at once on the All and the Each is shaping the work of the New Millenium - a work named "the universalization of the individual and the individualization of the universe". It is at the service of this Work, that the cultural sections titled "Creative", "Reviews" and "Articles" extend their light.

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