Atavism: “the recurrence of a
genetically controlled feature in an organism after it has been absent for
several generations, usually because of an accidental recombination of genes.”
This is the usual professional content of the term which rather has to be seen
in its deeper psychological aspects. The compilation from the Mother’s writings
on several different occasions brings out in a luminous way its true and
acceptable connotation. This should help us to examine the latest biography of
Sri Aurobindo in the proper perspective. Thanks to Paulette for this timely and
thoughtful presentation.
“You think,” asks the Mother, “it
is you who decide: these are impulses coming from outside. You think you are
conscious of your will: it is a consciousness which is not yours. And
everything... you are made up entirely of something which is the forces of
Nature expressing a higher Will of which you are unconscious.
Only, one doesn’t understand this except when one can come out of one’s ego, though it be only for a moment; for the ego—and this is its strength—is convinced that it alone decides. But if one looks attentively, one notices that it is moved by all sorts of things which are not itself.”
For connection of this compilation,
please go to Archetypal Images and Symbols.
~ RYD
The
world we see and our outer consciousness: a bundle of habits
You think it is you who decide: these are impulses coming from outside. You
think you are conscious of your will: it is a consciousness which is not yours.
And everything... you are made up entirely of something which is the forces of
Nature expressing a higher Will of which you are unconscious.
Only, one doesn’t understand this
except when one can come out of one’s ego, though it be only for a moment; for
the ego—and this is its strength—is convinced that it alone decides. But if one
looks attentively, one notices that it is moved by all sorts of things which
are not itself.
But then what is mental and vital
will?
That is an expression of something
which is not personal.
If you analyse carefully, you see,
for instance, that all that you think has been thought by others, that these
are things which circulate and pass through you, but you have not produced this
thought, you are not the originator of this thought. All your reactions come
from atavism, from those who gave you birth and from the environment in which
you have lived, from all the impressions which have accumulated in you and
constituted something which seems to you yourself, yet which is not produced by
you, but merely felt and experienced; you become aware of it in passing, but it
is not you who created it, not you who gave it birth.
It could be said that these are
like sounds—any kind of sounds: words, music, anything—recorded by an
instrument, then reproduced by another instrument which plays them back like a
gramophone, for instance. You wouldn’t say that the gramophone has created the
sound you hear, would you? That would never occur to you. But as you are under
the illusion of your separate personality, these thoughts which cross your mind
and find expression, these feelings which pass through your vital and find
expression, you think, have come from you; but nothing comes from you. Where is
the “you” which can create all that?
You must go deep, deep within, and
find the eternal essence of your being to know the creative reality in
yourself. And once you have found that, you will realise that it is one single
thing, the same in all others, and so where is your separate personality?
Nothing’s left any longer.
(…)
But there’s nothing separate or
independent; there is only one Substance, one Force, one Consciousness,
one Will, which moves in countless ways of being.
And it is so complicated that one
is no longer aware of it, but if one steps back and follows the movement, no
matter which line of movement, one can see very clearly that the vibrations
propagate themselves, one following another, one following another, one
following another, and that in fact there is only one unity—unity of Substance,
unity of Consciousness, unity of Will. And that is the only reality. Outwardly
there is a kind of illusion: the illusion of separation and the illusion of
difference.
Desires and all those things also?
This is not personal. Not at all
personal. And that is very easy to find out; of all things this is the
easiest to discern, because ninety times out of a hundred it comes to you from
someone else or from a certain circumstance or a set of circumstances, or from
a vibration coming from another person or several other people. It is very easy
to discern, it is the first thing one can discern: it is a vibration which
suddenly awakens something similar in you. You know, something makes an impact
on you, and this impact brings up a response, as when you play a note. Well,
this vibration of desire comes and strikes you in a certain way and you
respond.
It is not very difficult to
discern; even when one is very young, even when one is a child, if one pays
attention, one becomes aware of this. One lives amidst constant collective
suggestions, constantly; for example, I don’t know if you have been present at
funerals, or if you have been in a house where someone has died—naturally you
must observe yourself a little, otherwise you won’t notice anything—but if you
observe yourself a little, you will see that you had no special reason to feel
any sorrow or grief whatever for the passing away of this person; he is a
person like many others; this has happened and by a combination of social
circumstances you have come to that house. And there, suddenly, without knowing
why or how, you feel a strong emotion, a great sorrow, a deep pain, and you ask
yourself, “Why am I so unhappy?” It is quite simply the vibrations which have
entered you, nothing else.
(…)
It is the same thing for anger. It
is very clear, one receives it suddenly, not even from a person, from the
atmosphere—it is there—and then all of a sudden it enters you and usually it
gets hold of you from below and then rises up and pushes you, and so off you
go. A minute earlier you were not angry, you were quite self-possessed, you had
no intention of losing your temper. And this seizes you so strongly that you
can’t resist —because you are not sufficiently conscious, you let it enter you,
and it makes use of you—you... what you call “yourself”, that is to say, your
body; for apparently (I say apparently) it is something separate from your
neighbour’s body. But that is only an optical illusion, because in fact all the
time there are what may be called particles, even physical particles, like a
sort of radiation which comes out of the body and gets mixed with others; and
because of this, when one is very sensitive, one can feel things at a distance.
It is said, for instance, that the
blind develop such a sensitivity, so delicate a sense-perception, that when
they are nearing an object they feel an impact at a distance. But one can quite
easily make the experiment. For example, drawing near to someone without making
any noise, then bringing one’s hand quite close—sensitive people feel it at
once. You haven’t put your will for them to feel it, you haven’t brought in any
psychological element, you have only made a purely physical experiment of
approaching noiselessly and without being heard—a sensitive person will feel it
at once.
That means that the body seems to
end there, but it’s simply the way our eyes are made. If we had a little more
subtle vision, with a little wider range, well, we would see that there is
something which comes out, as something comes out from other bodies—and that
all this gets mixed up and interacts.
What does Sri Aurobindo mean by
“oneness in dynamic force”?
That’s what I was saying. There is
a dynamic force which moves all things, and when you become conscious of it,
you see that it is one single Force which moves all things; and as you become
conscious, you can even follow its movement and see how it works through men
and things.
From the minute you become
conscious of the Unity—unity of Force, unity of Consciousness and unity of
Will—well, you no longer have the perception which makes you quite separate
from others, so that you do not know what goes on in them, they are strangers to
you, you are shut up as it were in your own skin, and have no contact with
others except quite externally and superficially. But this happens precisely
because you have not realised in yourself the perception of this oneness of
Consciousness, Force and Will—even of material vibrations.
It is the complexity which makes
this perception difficult —for our faculties of perception are quite linear and
very one-sided; so when we want to understand, we are immediately assailed by
countless things which are almost inconsistent with each other and intermix in
such an intricate way that one can no longer make out the lines and follow
things—one suddenly enters a whirlwind.
But this is because... For
instance, most men think one thought after another, even as they have to say
one word after another—they can’t say more than one word at the same time, you
know, or else they stammer. Well, most people think like that, they think one
thought after another, and so their whole consciousness has a linear movement.
But one begins to perceive things only when one can see spherically, globally,
think spherically, that is, have innumerable thoughts and perceptions
simultaneously.
Naturally, up to now, if one wanted
to describe things, one had to describe them one after another, for one can’t
say ten words at once, one says one word after another; and that is why all one
says is practically quite incapable of expressing the truth, quite incapable.
For we have to say one thing after another—the minute we say them one after another,
they are no longer true. They must all be said at the same time, just as they
can all be seen at the same time, and each one in its place.
So, when one begins to see like
this—to see, to discern, to feel, to think, to will like this—one draws near
the Truth. But so long as one sees as one speaks, oh, what a lamentable
poverty!
8
February 1956, 8, 51-6
What
does “choose one’s family” mean?
You
have come into the world in a certain milieu, among certain people. When you
are quite young, but for a few rare exceptions, what surrounds you seems
altogether natural to you, because you are born in its midst and are quite used
to it. But when, a little later, a spiritual aspiration wakes up in you, you
may quite possibly feel yourself completely ill at ease in the environment
where you have lived, if, for instance, the people who have brought you up
don’t have the same aspiration or if their ideas are the very opposite of what
is developing in you. Instead of saying, “You see, I belong to this family,
what shall I do? I have a mother, a father, brothers, sisters...”, you can set
out in search (I don’t mean necessarily travel), set out in search of spirits
who have an affinity with yours, people who have a similar aspiration and, if
you have the sincere aspiration to find those who like you are in quest of
something, you will always have the occasion to meet them in one way or
another, through quite unexpected circumstances; and when you have found one or
more people who are in exactly the same state of mind and have the same
aspiration, quite naturally there will be created bonds of closeness, intimacy,
friendship and, among you, you will form a kind of brotherhood, that is to say,
a true family. You are together because you are close to one another, you are together
because you have the same aspiration, you are together because you want to
create the same goal in life; you understand one another when you speak, you
have no need to discuss anything which is said and you live in a kind of inner
harmony. This is the true family, this is the family of aspiration, the family
of spiritual inclinations.
Now,
about the country, this may depend upon all sorts of things, this may depend
upon a sort of inner affinity. For instance, if you come to a country and there
you find a kind of response, an inner response to your aspiration, you find the
surroundings more in conformity with your tastes, your tendencies, you may very
well choose to live in this country, which is not necessarily that of your
birth; and since you choose that country to live there, you may say, “This is
my country.” There are people, many people who go and settle elsewhere for very
materialistic and uninteresting reasons most of the time, but there are also
others who are in search of an environment which suits their inner taste, their
aspiration, or who seek lands, ways of living more in keeping with their deeper
nature; then they settle down somewhere and don’t move again, and when they
stay there for a number of years, they can really feel that this country is
theirs, much more than the house or village or city where they were born.
Is
the vital distorted from the very birth?
If
your birth was not an accident, you could very well think there was no
distortion, but what you are at your birth is most of the time almost
absolutely what your mother and father have made you, and also, through them,
what your grandparents have made you. There are certain vital traditions in
families and, besides, there is the state of consciousness in which you were
formed, conceived—the moment at which you were conceived—and that, not once in
a million times does that state conform to true aspiration; and it is only a
true aspiration which could make your vital pure of all mixture, make the vital
element attracted for the formation of the being a pure element, free from all
contagion; I mean that if a psychic being enters there, it can gather elements
favourable to its growth. In the world as it is, things are so mixed up, have
been so mixed up in every way, that it is almost impossible to have elements of
the vital sufficiently pure not to suffer the contagion of all other
contaminated beings.
I
think I have already spoken about that, I have said what kind of aspiration
ought to be there in the parents before the birth; but as I said, this does not
happen even once in a hundred thousand instances. The willed conception of a
child is extremely rare; mostly it is an accident. Among innumerable parents it
is quite a small minority that even simply bothers about what a child could be;
they do not even know that what the child will be depends on what they are. It
is a very small élite which knows this. Most of the time things go as they can;
anything at all happens and people don’t even realise what is happening. So, in
these conditions how do you expect to be born with a vital being sufficiently
pure to be of help to you? One is born with a slough to clean before one begins
to live. And once you have made a good start on the way to the inner
transformation and you go down to the subconscient root of the being—that
exactly which comes from parents, from atavism—well, you do see what it is! And
all, almost all difficulties are there, there are very few things added to
existence after the first years of life. This happens at any odd moment; if you
keep bad company or read bad books, the poison may enter you; but there are all
the imprints deep-rooted in the subconscient, the dirty habits you have and
against which you struggle. For instance, there are people who can’t open their
mouth without telling a lie, and they don’t always do this deliberately (that
is the worst of it), or people who can’t come in touch with others without
quarrelling, all sorts of stupidities—they are there in the subconscient,
deeply rooted. Now, when you have a goodwill, externally you do your best to
avoid all that, to correct it if possible; you work, you fight; then become
aware that this thing always keeps coming up, it comes up from some part which
escapes your control. But if you enter this subconscient, if you let your
consciousness infiltrate it, and look carefully, gradually you will discover
all the sources, all the origins of all your difficulties; then you will begin
to understand what your fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers
were, and if at a certain moment you are unable to control yourself, you will
understand, “I am like that because they were like that.”
If
you have within you a psychic being sufficiently awake to watch over you, to
prepare your path, it can draw towards you things which help you, draw people,
books, circumstances, all sorts of little coincidences which come to you as
though brought by some benevolent will and give you an indication, a help, a
support to take decisions and turn you in the right direction. But once you
have taken this decision, once you have decided to find the truth of your
being, once you start sincerely on the road, then everything seems to conspire
to help you to advance, and if you observe carefully you see gradually the
source of your difficulties: “Ah! Wait a minute, this defect was in my father;
oh! this habit was my mother’s; oh! my grandmother was like this, my
grandfather was like that.” Or it could well be the nurse who took care of you
when you were small, or brothers and sisters who played with you, the little
friends you met, and you will find that all this was there, in this person or
that or the other. But if you continue to be sincere, you find you can cross
all this quite calmly, and after a time you cut all the moorings with which you
were born, break the chains and go freely on the path.
If
you really want to transform your character, it is that you must do. It has
always been said that it is impossible to change one’s nature; in all books of
philosophy, even of yoga, you are told the same story: “You cannot change your
character, you are born like that, you are like that.” This is absolutely
false, I guarantee it is false; but there is something very difficult to do to
change your character, because it is not your character which must be changed,
it is the character of your antecedents. In them you will not change it
(because they have no such intention), but it is in you that it must be
changed. It is what they have given you, all the little gifts made to you at
your birth—nice gifts—it is this which must be changed. But if you succeed in
getting hold of the thread of these things, the true thread, since you have
worked upon this with perseverance and sincerity, one fine morning you will be
free; all this will fall off from you and you will be able to get a start in
life without any burden. Then you will be a new man, living a new life, almost
with a new nature. And if you look back you will say, “It is not possible, I
was never like that!”
29 March 1951, 4, 258-62
Only
those who have developed a little artistic taste, have travelled much and seen
many things have widened their consciousness and they are no longer so
sectarian. But it is very difficult to pull a person out of the specialised
tastes of his race—I am not even speaking now of the country, I am speaking of
the race. It is very difficult. It is there, you know, hidden right at the
bottom, in the subconscious, and it comes back without your even noticing it,
quite spontaneously, quite naturally. Even on this very point: the woman of
your race is always much more beautiful than the woman of other
races—spontaneously, it is the spontaneous taste. That’s what I mean. So, you
must rise above that. I am not even speaking of those who find everything
that’s outside their own family or caste very ugly and bad. I am not speaking
at all of these people. I am not even speaking of those for whom one country is
much more beautiful than another. And yet, these people have already risen
above the altogether ordinary way of thinking. I am not even speaking of a
question of race.... It is very difficult, one must go right down, right down
within oneself into the subconscious—and even farther—to discover the root of
these things. Therefore, if you want to have the sense of beauty in itself —which
is quite independent of all these tastes, the taste of the race—you must have a
universal consciousness. Otherwise how can you have it? You will always have
preferences. Even if these are not active and conscious preferences, they are
subconscious preferences, instincts. So, to know true beauty independent of all
form, one must rise above all form. And once you have known it beyond every
form, you can recognise it in any form whatsoever, indifferently. And that
becomes very interesting.
21 October 1953, 5, 329-30
Most
people want to be what they call “quiet”, what they call “peaceful”, to have a
small organisation in their own measure —which is generally microscopic, and
consists of a regular routine of almost the same activities always, within almost
the same bounds, in almost the same surroundings—and all that repeated without
much difference; with a sufficient variety not to become completely boring, but
with nothing that might disturb this regular round which makes what is called a
peaceful life. For the vast majority of people this is the ideal.
And
so, the realisation of this ideal in its details depends solely on the country
where they are born, the society in which they are born, and the customs of
their environment. Their ideal is fashioned by the manners of the country and
society in which they live.
Of
course, there are exceptions, but they only prove the rule. Generally speaking,
the most common ideal is to be born in an environment comfortable enough to
avoid too many difficulties in life, to marry someone who won’t give you too
much trouble, to have healthy children who grow up normally—again to avoid
trouble—and then a quiet and happy old age, and not be too ill, again to avoid
trouble. And then to pass away when one is tired of life, again because one
does not want any trouble.
Indeed,
this is the most widespread ideal. Naturally, there are exceptions, one may
even find the exact opposite. But existence, as men conceive it, would be
rather monotonous. The differences would come in the details, for in one
country people prefer one thing and in another, another; and then, in the
society in which one is born, there are certain customs and an ideal of
happiness, and in another society there are other customs and another ideal of
happiness—and that’s all.
8 February 1956, 8, 57-8
Naturally
these influences are of very diverse kinds. They may be studied from a
psychological point of view or from an almost mechanical standpoint, the one
usually translating the other, that is, the mechanical phenomenon occurs as a
sort of result of the psychological one.
In
very few people, and even in the very best at very rare moments in life, does
the will of the being express that deep inner, higher truth.
(After
a silence Mother continues:) The individual consciousness extends far
beyond the body; we have seen that even the subtle physical which is yet
material compared with the vital being and in certain conditions almost
visible, extends at times considerably beyond the visible limits of the physical
body. This subtle physical is constituted of active vibrations which enter into
contact or mingle with the vibrations of the subtle physical of others, and
this reciprocal contact gives rise to influences—naturally the most powerful
vibrations get the better of the others. For example, as I have already told
you several times, if you have a thought, this thought clothes itself in subtle
vibrations and becomes an entity which travels and moves about in the
earth-atmosphere in order to realize itself as best it can, and because it is
one among millions, naturally there is a multiple and involved interaction as a
result of which things don’t take place in such a simple and schematic fashion.
What
you call yourself, the individual being enclosed within the limits of your
present consciousness, is constantly penetrated by vibrations of this kind,
coming from outside and very often presenting themselves in the form of
suggestions, in the sense that, apart from a few exceptions, the action takes
place first in the mental field, then becomes vital, then physical. I want to
make it clear that it is not a question of the pure mind here, but of the
physical mind; for in the physical consciousness itself there is a mental
activity, a vital activity and a purely material activity, and all that takes
place in your physical consciousness, in your body consciousness and bodily
activity, penetrates first in the form of vibrations of a mental nature, and so
in the form of suggestions. Most of the time these suggestions enter you
without your being in the least conscious of them; they go in, awaken some sort
of response in you, then spring up in your consciousness as though they were
your own thought, your own will, your own impulse; but it is only because you
are unconscious of the process of their penetration.
These
suggestions are very numerous, manifold, varied, with natures which are very,
very different from each other, but they may be classified into three principal
orders. First—and they are hardly perceptible to the ordinary consciousness;
they become perceptible only to those who have already reflected much, observed
much, deeply studied their own being—they are what could be called collective
suggestions.
When
a being is born upon earth, he is inevitably born in a certain country and a
certain environment. Due to his physical parents he is born in a set of social,
cultural, national, sometimes religious circumstances, a set of habits of
thinking, of understanding, of feeling, conceiving, all sorts of constructions
which are at first mental, then become vital habits and finally material modes
of being. To put things more clearly, you are born in a certain society or
religion, in a particular country, and this society has a collective conception
of its own and this nation has a collective conception of its own, this
religion has a collective “construction” of its own which is usually very
fixed. You are born into it. Naturally, when you are very young, you are
altogether unaware of it, but it acts on your formation—that formation, that
slow formation through hours and hours, through days and days, experiences
added to experiences, which gradually builds up a consciousness. You are
underneath it as beneath a bell-glass. It is a kind of construction which
covers and in a way protects you, but in other ways limits you considerably.
All this you absorb without even being aware of it and this forms the
subconscious basis of your own construction. This subconscious basis will act
on you throughout your life, if you do not take care to free yourself from it.
And to free yourself from it, you must first of all become aware of it; and the
first step is the most difficult, for this formation was so subtle, it was made
when you were not yet a conscious being, when you had just fallen altogether
dazed from another world into this one (laughing) and it all happened
without your participating in the least in it. Therefore, it does not even
occur to you that there could be something to know there, and still less
something you must get rid of. And it is quite remarkable that when for some
reason or other you do become aware of the hold of this collective suggestion,
you realise at the same time that a very assiduous and prolonged labour is
necessary in order to get rid of it. But the problem does not end there.
You
live surrounded by people. These people themselves have desires, stray wishes,
impulses which are expressed through them and have all kinds of causes, but
take in their consciousness an individual form. For example, to put it in very
practical terms: you have a father, a mother, brothers, sisters, friends,
comrades; each one has his own way of feeling, willing, and all those with whom
you are in relation expect something from you, even as you expect something
from them. That something they do not always express to you, but it is more or
less conscious in their being, and it makes formations. These formations,
according to each one’s capacity of thought and the strength of his vitality,
are more or less powerful, but they have their own little strength which is
usually much the same as yours; and so what those around you want, desire, hope
or expect from you enters in this way in the form of suggestions very rarely
expressed, but which you absorb without resistance and which suddenly awaken
within you a similar desire, a similar will, a similar impulse.... This happens
from morning to night, and again from night to morning, for these things don’t
stop while you are sleeping, but on the contrary are very often intensified
because your consciousness is no longer awake, watching and protecting you to
some extent.
And
this is quite common, so common that it is quite natural and so natural that
you need special circumstances and most unusual occasions to become aware of
it. Naturally, it goes without saying that your own responses, your own
impulses, your own wishes have a similar influence on others, and that all this
becomes a marvellous mixture in which might is always right!
If
that were the end of the problem, one could yet come out of the mess; but there
is a complication. This terrestrial world, this human world is constantly
invaded by the forces of the neighbouring world, that is, of the vital world,
the subtler region beyond the fourfold earth-atmosphere;
and this vital world which is not under the influence of the psychic forces or
the psychic consciousness is essentially a world of ill-will, of disorder,
disequilibrium, indeed of all the most anti-divine things one could imagine. This
vital world is constantly penetrating the physical world, and being much more
subtle than the physical, it is very often quite imperceptible except to a few
rare individuals. There are entities, beings, wills, various kinds of
individualities in that world, who have all kinds of intentions and make use of
every opportunity either to amuse themselves if they are small beings or to do
harm and create disorder if they are beings with a greater capacity. And the
latter have a very considerable power of penetration and suggestion, and
wherever there is the least opening, the least affinity, they rush in, for it
is a game which delights them.
Besides,
they are very thirsty or hungry for certain human vital vibrations which for
them are a rare dish they love to feed upon; and so their game lies in exciting
pernicious movements in man so that man may emanate these forces and they be
able to feed on them just as they please. All movements of anger, violence,
passion, desire, all these things which make you abruptly throw off certain
energies from yourself, project them from yourself, are exactly what these
entities of the vital world like best, for, as I said, they enjoy them like a
sumptuous dish. Now, their tactics are simple: they send you a little
suggestion, a little impulse, a small vibration which enters deep into you and
through contagion or sympathy awakens in you the vibration necessary to make
you throw off the force they want to absorb.
There
it is a little easier to recognise the influence, for, if you are the least bit
attentive, you become aware of something that has suddenly awakened within you.
For example, those who are in the habit of losing their temper, if they have
attempted ever so little to control their anger, they will find something coming
from outside or rising from below which actually takes hold of their
consciousness and arouses anger in them. I don’t mean that everybody is capable
of this discernment; I am speaking of those who have tried to understand their
being and control it. These adverse suggestions are easier to distinguish than,
for instance, your response to the will or desire of a being who is of the same
nature as yourself, another human being, who consequently acts on you without
this giving you a clear impression of something coming from outside: the
vibrations are too alike, too similar in their nature, and you have to be much
more attentive and have a much sharper discernment to realise that these
movements which seem to come out from you are not really yours but come from
outside. But with the adverse forces, if you are in the least sincere and
observe yourself attentively, you become aware that it is something in the
being which is responding to an influence, an impulse, a suggestion, even
something at times very concrete, which enters and produces similar vibrations
in the being.
12 December 1956, 8, 390-4
Sweet Mother, how can we escape
from other people’s influence?
By concentrating more and more
totally and completely on the Divine. If you aspire with all your ardour, if
you want to receive only the divine influence, if all the time you pull back
towards yourself what is taken, caught by other influences and with your will
put it under the divine influence, you succeed in doing it. It’s a work that
can’t be done in a day, in a minute; you must be vigilant for a very long time,
for years; but one can succeed.
First of all you must will it.
For all things, first you must
understand, will, and then begin to practise—begin by just a very little. When
you catch yourself in the act of doing something because someone else wanted it
or because you are not very sure of what you want to do and are in the habit of
doing what this one or that one or tradition or customs make you do—because,
among the influences under which you live, there are collective suggestions,
social traditions, many!... Social habits are something terrible; your
consciousness is stuffed with them from the time you are quite small; when a
baby you are already told: “This should be done, that should not be done, you
must do this in this way, you must not do it in that way”, and all that; these
are ideas which usually parents or teachers have received in the same way when
they were very young and to which they are accustomed and submit by habit;
these are the most dangerous influences because they are subtle, they are not
expressed outwardly by words; your head was stuffed with them and your feelings
and reactions, when you were very small, and it is only later, much later, when
you begin to reflect and try to know what the truth is... as soon as you
understand that there is something which must be put above all the rest, that
there is something which can truly teach you to live, which must form your
character, rule your movements... when you understand that, you can look at
yourself doing, objectivise yourself, laugh a little at all those multiple
small bondages of habit, traditions, the education you have received, and then
put the light, consciousness, aspiration for surrender to the Divine on these
things, and try to receive the divine inspiration to do things as it’s
necessary, not according to habits, not according to one’s vital impulses, not
according to all the vital impulses and personal wills which one receives from
others and which push him to do things which perhaps he would not have done
without all that.
One must observe all these things,
look at them attentively and put them one after another in front of the divine
Truth as one can receive it—it is progressive, one receives it purer and purer,
stronger and stronger, more and more clear-sightedly—put all these things
before it and with an absolute sincerity will that this may guide you
and nothing else. You do this once, a hundred times, a thousand times, millions
of times and after years of sustained effort you can gradually become aware
that at last you are a free being—because this is what’s remarkable: that when
one is perfectly surrendered to the Divine one is perfectly free, and this
is the absolute condition for freedom, to belong to the Divine alone; you
are free from the whole world because you belong only to Him. And this
surrender is the supreme liberation, you are also free from your little
personal ego and of all things this is the most difficult—and the happiest too,
the only thing that can give you a constant peace, an uninterrupted joy and the
feeling of an infinite freedom from all that afflicts you, dwarfs,
diminishes, impoverishes you, and from all that can create the least anxiety in
you, the least fear. You are no longer afraid of anything, you no longer fear
anything, you are the supreme master of your destiny because it is the Divine
who wills in you and guides everything.
20 July
1955, 7, 241-2
Do
not try to appear virtuous. See how much you are united, one with everything that
is anti-divine. Take your share of the burden, accept yourselves to be impure
and false and in that way you will be able to take up the Shadow and offer it.
And in so far as you are capable of taking it and offering it, then things will
change.
Do
not try to be among the pure. Accept to be with those who are in darkness and
give it all with total love.
21 January 1962, 10, 118-21