Botanical
Name :Azadirachta Indica
Common Name
: Neem
Spiritual
Name : Spiritual Atmosphere
Light,
fluid, clear, transparent -
and
so clean !
General Information
The Neem has been very
popular and widely used in India for medical purposes from ancient
times. There is now a growing interest in it all around the world.
The Neem is a comparatively
large deciduous tree with many compound leaves with unequal sides.
The tips are acute, the margins serrate. The small starlike whitish
or cream coloured flowers have a sweet scent and grow in panicles
in the axils of the leaves. The fruits are elliptic in shape and
contain one seed.
This year at Pondicherry,
we had weeks of abundance of Neem flowers in the month of April.
What a gift to walk in the evenings through the streets filled with
the sweetness of spiritual atmosphere!
Medical Uses
The fruits of Neem are
used as insecticide as well as antiseptic medicine in skin diseases,
wounds, ulcers, intestinal worms. The Neem oil is very useful for
chronic skin diseases, scabies, chronic malarial fever and leprosy.
The green twigs are used for cleaning the teeth and the flowers
fried in ghee are a tonic and help for burning sensations, colic,
dyspepsia. The tender leaves are bitter, astringent, antiseptic
and refrigerant. Eaten on empty stomach every morning they keep
the system clean.
The Sure Condition of Progress
Here are two quotations
from Sri Aurobindo on the importance and meaning of Spiritual Atmosphere
and Spiritual Living.
"A spiritual atmosphere
is more important than outer conditions; if one can get that and
also create one's own spiritual air to breathe in and live in
it, that is the true condition of progress."
*
"In all spiritual
living the inner life is the thing of first importance; the spiritual
man lives always within, and in a world of the Ignorance that
refuses to change he has to be in a certain sense separate from
it and to guard his inner life against the intrusion and influence
of the darker forces of the Ignorance: he is out of the world
even when he is within it; if he acts upon it, it is from the
fortress of his inner spiritual being where in the inmost sanctuary
he is one with the Supreme Existence or the soul and God are alone
together."
- Sri Aurobindo
