Thanks. On the nation soul, I agree, if it exists it is not of trivial access even to those who are in search of the soul. To the general populace, it is completely inaccessible and easily reified into or substituted for a preferential dogma. It is also critical to remember, as you say, "that whatever its unique individuality, it remains fully based on conscious oneness with other souls, as well as with universal and transcendent reality." This is indeed the message of the chapter "True and False Subjectivism" in The Human Cycle. Moreover, whatever spiritual case can be made for an atemporal "nation-soul," as Sri Aurobindo brings out in The Ideal of Human Unity, its emergence in any recognizable form is only within history, through events which often seem accidental. As such, continuities and disjunctures are both to be understood as aspects of a progressive becoming, whose inner drift is only apparent to the highly trained yogic eye. DB