The writings included in this volume, like those in the three preceding volumes of the series, are based on talks given by the Mother to the young children of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. They were originally published in Journals connected with the Ashram, during the years 1955—1956.

THE YOGA

SRI AUROBINDO

TO THE CHILDREN OF THE ASHRAM

Choosing to do Yoga

To do Sri Aurobindo's Yoga means to seek to transform oneself integrally, to have this single aim in one's life: that alone exists, nothing else. You feel it in yourself whether you want it or not. If you do not, you can have a life of good will, service, understanding; you can work in many other ways. But between that and doing Yoga there is a great difference.

To do Yoga you must want it consciously, you must know first of all what it is,—know what it is and then take the resolution. And once the resolution is taken you must waver no more. When you go to it, you must take it up fully conscious of what you are doing. When you say "I want to do Yoga", you must know what you are deciding about. That is why when I have spoken to you I have not laid much stress upon this aspect of the thing. I have surely spoken about it and even perhaps a good deal—I am here to speak, and you to listen; but what I mean is that whatever I may have said generally, it is only when individually one comes to me and says that he wants to do Yoga, that I say "yes" (or "no", if necessary). For such persons things become different, the conditions of life become different, particularly inner things and conditions.

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Always there is a Consciousness here and it acts constantly to rectify your position: all the while it puts you in the face of obstacles that prevent you from progressing, it makes you dash your nose against your own errors and blindnesses. But this happens only in the case of those who have decided to do Yoga. For others the Consciousness acts as a light, a knowledge, a force for progress, so that you may reach the maximum of your capacities, develop yourself as far as possible in an atmosphere as favourable as it may be, leaving you, however, completely free to choose.

The decision must come from within. All who come consciously for Yoga, knowing what Yoga is, have to accept conditions of life very different from those that others enjoy—externally perhaps there may not be any difference, but internally there is a wide gulf. There is a kind of absoluteness in the Consciousness that does not allow any deviation from the Path: errors committed become immediately visible with such consequences that one cannot deceive oneself any longer and things take a very serious aspect.

You all, my children, I may tell you,—I have already told you many times and I still repeat, you live in an uncommon freedom. Externally there are a few small restrictions, for, as we are many and have not the whole earth at our disposal, we have to submit ourselves to some discipline to a certain extent, so that there may not be too much disorder; but internally you live in wonderful liberty, no social restraint, no moral restraint, no intellectual

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restraint, no fixed principle, nothing is there, save and except a light. If you wish to profit by it, you get the profit; if you do not want, you are free not to profit by it.

But the day you make a choice, and when you do it with all sincerity and you feel within you a radical decision, things become, as I say, quite different. There is the light and there is the way to follow, straight on, one must not turn aside. It deceives none and none can deceive it. Yoga, you must know, is not just a play. When you choose, you must know what you have done. And when you have chosen your way, you must stick to it. You have no more right to hesitate. You have to go ahead. That is all.

The least, however, that I expect from you is the will to do things well, an effort towards progress, the desire to be in life something better than oridnary humanity. You are brought up, you have grown up under conditions that are unusually luminous, conscious, harmonious, full of good will. And in answer to that it is proper that you should be upon earth in some way an expression of that light and harmony and good-will. That would be something fair.

One can do the Yoga, the Yoga of Transformation—of all things the most difficult—only when one feels that one is here, upon earth, for this alone and has nothing else to do, that this is the sole reason of one's existence. Even if you have to toil hard, suffer, struggle, it is of no consequence: "This alone and nothing else",—then it

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is a different matter. Otherwise I tell you: Be always happy, be always good; be good, meaning, be more understanding, know that you are growing up under exceptional conditions, try to live a life higher, nobler and truer than the ordinary life and let a little of this Consciousness, this light and this benevolence express itself in the world.

* *

It is not for a personal and egoistic aim that you seek perfection, it is for the sake of manifesting the Divine, it is to put all at the service of the Divine. You do not do Yoga with the intention of perfecting yourself personally, for your own sake, but for the divine work that has to be done, for the fulfilment of the Divine Will

So long as a personal aspiration is there, a personal desire, an egoistic will, it is a mixture, it is not the exact expression of the Divine Will. The only thing that counts is the Divine, His Will, His manifestation, His expression. You are for that, you are that, and nothing else. If there happens to be a feeling of I, of ego, of the individual person, it means that you are not yet what you ought to be. I do not say that the thing can be done forthwith, but that this is the truth of the matter.

For, on this level, on the spiritual level, too many people,—in fact, the majority of those who take up the spiritual life—do Yoga for personal reasons, all kinds of personal reasons: some because they are disgusted with

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life, others because they are unhappy, some others because they wish to have more knowledge, others again because they want to be spiritually great, yet others because they want to learn things so that they may teach them to others, and so on, there are a thousand personal reasons to do the Yoga. But there are not many to do the simple act of giving oneself to the Divine — this act in all its purity and consistency — so that the Divine may take one up and do with one what He wants. With that you go straight to your goal and never run the risk of making a mistake. But all the other motives are mixed up, tainted with ego and they can lead you hither and thither and far away from the goal.

This feeling that there is for you only one reason for existence, one single motive, the total complete perfect consecration to the Divine, to such a degree that you are unable to distinguish between yourself and the Divine, you become the Divine wholly, absolutely, without any personal reaction whatsoever intervening: this is the ideal attitude. And that is the only one with which you can progress safely in life, protected from everything, protected even from yourself—for of all dangers the greatest is that which comes from one's own self, one's egoistic self.

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Order and Discipline

You must become conscious of yourself, conscious in every detail. You must organise what you call yourself around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being so that you can possess a single, cohesive, fully conscious being: as this centre is wholly consecrated to the Divine, if all the elements are organised harmoniously around it, they too get consecrated to the Divine. Thus, when the Divine wills it, when the time comes, when the work of individualisation is complete, then the Divine permits you to let your ego melt in Him, so that you may exist for the Divine alone. But it is the Divine that takes the decision. You should have done the whole preliminary work first, become a conscious being, solely and exclusively centred around the Divine and governed by Him. When your ego has served its purpose in forming a complete individual out of you, when that work is perfectly, fully achieved, then you can say to the Divine, "Here, I am ready now; do you want me?" The Divine generally says, "Yes." Then everything is worked out, everything accomplished. You become a true instrument for the Divine's work. But the instrument must be built up first.

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You are sent to school, you are asked to do exercises (both mental and physical); do you think it is just to put you to trouble? No, it is because a surrounding is absolutely necessary where you can learn to form yourself. If you tried by yourself this work of individualisation, integral formation, all alone in one corner, you would be asked nothing till you have done it; but you are not likely to do it, not a single child would do it, he would not even know how to do it or where to begin. If a child is not taught how to live, he would not be able to live, he would not know how to do anything. The most elementary movements it is not able to do unless it is taught. Therefore if every one were to go through the whole experience, unaided, in the matter of forming his individuality, he would be dead long before he could begin to exist even. That is the utility of the experiences of others, accumulated through centuries, of those who have had the experience and who tell you, "If you want to go quick, and learn in a few years what needed centuries to learn—well, do this, do that, this way, that way, read, study, attend to your lessons at school, in the playground." Once you are on the way, you can find your own method if you are a genius. But in the beginning you must know how to stand on your legs and walk. It is not easy to go all by oneself. That is why one needs education.

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There are children who are very disorderly. They do not know how to keep things tidy. They do not know even how to keep things. They lose or spoil them. There are several reasons for it. First of all, very often it means that the child lacks sufficient vitality. The vital is not strong enough to take care of external objects. Another reason may be that he does not find interest in the physical life; his interest may lie in the direction of mental occupation, imagination or dreaming etc. Or again it may be a lack of self-control and discipline.

Anyway the result is the same. That is to say, confusion. There are children who, when they undress, throw their clothings right and left or, when they have done their task, do not know where they put their books and paper, pencil, or ink pot; it takes a lot of trouble to find them again or bring them together. In reality, all this shows an undisciplined nature, a character that is not methodical; it shows that not only in the outside but internally too the person is disorderly. There are people, perhaps considering themselves big, who even have a contempt for physical objects. But Sri Aurobindo says, people who cannot take care of things do not deserve to have them, have no right to ask for them. As I say, it shows a kind of acute egoism, much inner confusion.

There are people who live in rooms apparently clean and tidy. But open a cupboard, pull out a drawer, you

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will find there a battlefield: all is mixed up. They have a head too that is very much like that—a poor small head where ideas are in the same condition as the objects outside in the cupboard. They have not organised them, put them in order. You may take it as an absolute rule. I have never seen a man who keeps things in a disorder and yet possesses a logical brain. In him ideas like the objects are thrown together pell-mell, the most dissimilar and contradictory ideas form a jumble, they are not organised, harmonised into a higher synthesis.

So to know a man's character you need not spend your time in talking to him, you just go and open a drawer of his or open his almirah, you will know. But I may speak of someone—I shall tell you presently who it is—who used to live in the midst of heaps of books and papers. You enter into his room, you find piles of them everywhere. But if by chance, you were, to your misfortune, to displace a single sheet of paper, he would know perfectly well and would ask immediately who was it that had disturbed the papers. There were masses of things, on your entering you would not find your way. But each thing had its place—notes, letters, books, all in order— and you could not mishandle them without his knowing it. Well, it was Sri Aurobindo. In other words, you must not confuse orderliness with poverty. Naturally if you have a few things—a dozen books and a limited number of objects—it is easier to have them properly arranged. But what is to be aimed at is a logical order, a conscious intelligent order among a multiplicity of objects. That

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requires a capacity for organisation. It is a capacity which every one must acquire and possess, unless of course you are physically disabled—when one is ill or sickly or maimed and has not the required strength: even then there is a limit. I know of sick people who could tell you: "Open me that drawer, you will find on the right or on the left or at the bottom such and such a thing." They could not themselves move and handle the things but knew where they were. Apart from such cases, the ideal must be one of order, organisation, like that of a library for example, where you have thousands and thousands of books that are yet all arranged, classified, docketed and you have only to name a title and in a few minutes the book is in your hand. Of course, it is not the work of a single person; even then, the pattern is there as an example to follow.

You too must organise your affairs in the same way. You need not follow another's method or system. You have your own rule, that which is convenient and true for you—but it must be well planned and properly laid out.

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Organise your Life

Moral notions have nothing to do with the growth of the inner being. I regret to say it, but the two are ill-assorted mates and go opposite ways. You may fall totally sick by doing a very unselfish act, on the other hand you may continue to be hale and hearty while doing the most egoistic acts.

There is a great difference between a moral consciousness and a consciousness that is the expression of truth. I tell you again it is infinitely more difficult to have a. consciousness expressing the truth than to have a moral consciousness. For any blockhead who knows social rules and follows them has a moral consciousness, but to have a consciousness of the truth, one must not be a blockhead, that is the first condition.

All the misadventures of life come from a lack of organisation of life. You live from moment to moment, take things as they arrive, somehow or other. Or, you try a mental organisation which does not at all agree with the truth and is therefore thwarted at each step. But if life is organised according to a higher principle, without the gropings that usually attend it, that is to say, following every minute a precise indication with regard to what is to be done and how it is to be done, then things can be arranged without mishaps.

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Generally speaking, it is better to choose one's work carefully, take up only as much as one is able to do and do that well; often you take up too much and in that too much there are a good amount of useless things which can be cut out or diminished considerably without affecting the result. I do not make this an absolute general rule. I am stating only an experience of mine. If you are all attention to the inner indication and you refuse to be pushed about by the waves coming from outside—movements of other people's will, routine circumstances or adverse forces that do not want the things to be done—I say, instead of being driven hither and thither, if you receive the clear precise inner sign and follow it without evading or hesitating, with a strictness even that may be displeasing to others—so much the worse for the others—in that case you find that you do become in some sort master of circumstances, they organise themselves favourably and you are able to do more work in less time.

There is a way of diminishing the time taken for a work and that is by increasing your concentration. There are people incapable of concentration; it tires them. But it is like carrying a weight; you can get used to it. So, first you have to master this power of concentration; for that you have to calm your mind and in that calmness, concentrate, go on concentrating on the point that you have to deal with, on the work that is to be done, whatever it is. The concentration comes with a kind of driving force, quiet but extremely powerful; and you

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go forward without hesitation. Then you can do in a quarter of an hour what might normally take full one hour. That saves you a good deal of time. You can, instead of continually passing from one work to another, stretch yourself for a while and have complete rest. The rest gives you relaxation to all the limbs that were under tension while you were working, that is to say, brings new strength to them and you can start again another spell of concentration.

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Doing for Her Sake

Whatever you do—study or sports—you must think of the Divine in doing it. It is not a very difficult thing after all. At first you may do it as a kind of preparation to make you capable of receiving the divine force, and then as service to help in the collective work. You can do it not for personal gain but in order to be ready for the Divine Work.

This seems to me indispensable. If you keep the ordinary point of view, you will always find yourself in conditions that are not wholly satisfactory and incapable of receiving all the forces that you can receive.

If you are doing long jump, for example, it should not be merely for the pleasure of doing it, it is with the idea of making your body more perfect in its functioning, an instrument more fit to receive the divine forces and to manifest them.

Indeed, everything that you do must be done in this spirit. Otherwise you do not profit by the opportunity, the favourable circumstances that are given to you.

The Consciousness is there pervading everything and seeking to manifest in all movements. And if you, on your side, tell yourself that the effort, the progress you make is to enable you to receive this Consciousness and

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to manifest it, then the work will naturally be done much better and more quickly.

And this seems to me to be the most elementary thing. For, to tell you the truth, I would be astonished if it were otherwise. For your presence at a place organised as it is would have no meaning if it were not for that. What would be its use? There are any number of universities and schools in the world that are much better manned and equipped than ours. If you are here, it must be for a special reason. It is because here there is a possibility of absorbing consciousness and progress. If you do not put yourself in a state in which you receive it, you lose the chance that you are given.

What do you think about it? Is it mere chance or simply because your parents have put you here that you are here, you might as well have been anywhere else? You should put these questions to yourselves. At thirteen one can begin questioning very well, especially if one finds himself at a place which is not quite ordinary. Why one is here, for what reasons, what is the purpose of being here?

If you had asked this, you should have gone and sought for the answer somewhere within you. For the answer is within you, nowhere outside. If you go deep enough you will find an answer very clear, very interesting. If you go deep down, into a silence where all external things are silenced, you will see there within a Flame of which I speak so often and within this Flame you will see your destiny. You will see the aspiration of centuries that

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has accumulated little by little to lead you through countless births to the great day of Realisation. This preparation has taken thousands of years and it is now arriving at its fruition.

And when you have gone deep enough to find that, you will see and feel that all your incapacities, weaknesses, all that in you denies and does not understand, all that is not yourself; it is simply a robe which fits you to a certain extent only and which you have put on for the occasion only.

But you must understand. If you wish to see yourself truly capable of profiting by the opportunity, doing what you wanted to do, what you aspired to do long long ago, you must little by little turn to the Light, the Consciousness, the Truth and bring them into these obscure elements of your external robe. It is only then that you will understand fully why you are here, not only understand but become capable of doing what you are here for.

Through centuries it has prepared itself in you, not naturally in this body, which is the most recent, but in your true being: for centuries it has been waiting for this occasion. You see how wonderful it all is! You see the things that one has hoped for since long long ago, for which one has prayed so much, laboured so much, find now the hour when they are being realised. It is the hour when great things are being done. One must not miss the occasion.

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Will and Desire

What is the difference between Desire or Wish and Will?

They are not the same thing. When, for example, you see that a thing is to be done and that it is good to do it, then normally your reason decides and judges; then it is your will that sets to work and makes you do what is necessary for the work to be done. Thus will is the power of execution which should be at the disposal of what has been decided by you or a higher force. It is a thing coordinated and organised: it acts according to plan and is in full self-control. Wish or desire, on the other hand, is an impulse. There are people who are full of desires, but have no will; they are eaten up with their desires, as it is said. You go nowhere if you have not even the will to fulfil your desires. The little bit of will most people have is indeed put at the service of their desires. Will is a force capable of deliberation and organisation and can be used for any purpose in view.

When you have the will, it means you have the capacity of sustained effort for a definite end. A desire, on the contrary, is something violent, passionate and momentary; it is very rarely a durable thing. It has not the stuff, the substance and organisation of a sustained effort.

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When desire gets hold of you, it can make you do anything, but in a fit of impulse, not in a methodical and consistent manner.

Why do children have the habit of always asking for things—material objects, I mean?

Precisely because they are full of desires. Perhaps when they were conceived, they were imbued with the vibrations of desire, and as they have no control over themselves, they give free vent to their feelings. Older people are also full of desires, but they are too shy to show them. They are ashamed of these things, they fear they will be ridiculed and so hide them. Children are more simple and straightforward; when they want anything, they speak out. They do not think that it is not proper or wise to reveal themselves. They do not reason in that way. People, of course—ordinary people, I mean—live constantly full of desires, only they do not express themselves, sometimes they do not even avow it to themselves. But it is always there, this sense of the need for things. Directly you see a beautiful object, you are at once seized by the idea of possessing it. It is childish, it is even ridiculous. Ninety-nine persons out of a hundred do not get at all the things they desire. And of the one per cent how many are interested in the thing once they have actually got it? A child is even more like that. Give him what he wants, a second after he will not even look at it.

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How to help a child to get out of this habit?

There is more than one method. First of all, it is to be known whether one may not altogether stop the child from expressing freely what he thinks and feels. People do this usually and constantly. They scold, they punish and the child takes the habit of hiding his desires. That does not cure. If you always tell the child, "No, you won't have it", you simply instal this idea in him: "Yes, when I am a child, I am not given anything, I must wait till I grow up; well, when I am a man I shall have all that I want". So I say it is not a cure; the task is not easy to bring up a child. There is however the other way of which I spoke, to give him what he wants. But the difficulty is that the next moment he will ask for another thing and continue to do so without end. For it is a law, the law of desire, that it is never satisfied. So you can change your method and tell the child, supposing it is intelligent enough: "You see, you wanted so much to have the thing and now that you have it you don't care, you ask for something different. You will do the same with that also." But if it is a shrewd child he would reply: "Well, the best way to cure me of my desires is to give what I ask for."

Many hold this last idea all their life. When they are told to overcome their desires, they answer, "The best way of overcoming them is to satisfy them." But what is needed is not merely to change the object of desire, but change the impulse, the movement itself. For that pur-

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pose, a good deal of knowledge and understanding and experience is required. That you cannot expect of young children. First of all, they do not possess the capacity for reasoning and you cannot explain the matter to them, they will not understand your reasons. It is why the parents have normally no other go than to cut them short, saying: "Stop, you bother us." That is how they get out of the difficulty.

It is not a solution. The task is hard, demanding continuous effort and unshakable patience. There are people, a good many, who, although no longer children, yet continue to be so all their life: they too do not understand reason. If you tell them, they are not reasonable and that it is not possible to be continually satisfying their desires, they simply think: "These people are quite unpleasant, they are not amiable." That is all.

What one may try, in respect of a child, is to turn the direction of his desires, let him desire better things, better because more true and also more difficult to obtain. For example, when you see a child full of desires, put into him a desire of higher quality, that is to say, instead of desiring purely material objects which can give only a temporary satisfaction, one could awaken in him the desire to know, to learn, to become great and so on. That would indeed be a very good beginning. As these things are more difficult to secure, it will serve to develop, to strengthen his will. Even if the difficulty is of a physical kind, if, for example, you give the child a doll to prepare, a Chinese

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puzzle to solve or a game of Patience, the effort helps in the development of concentration, perseverance, a certain clarity of ideas etc. You can in this way divert the child's will from wrong pursuits to right ones. True, it needs constant attendance and application on your part, but that seems to be the surest way. It is not easy, but it is the most effective.

To say "no" does not cure, but to say "yes" does not cure either. I knew some persons who allowed their children to do as they pleased. There was one child who tried to eat anything he could get hold of. Naturally he fell sick and got disgusted in the end and cured of the habit. Still the method means risk. For example, a child one day got hold of a match-box and as he was not stopped, burnt himself in playing with it, although thereafter he did not touch a match-box any more. The method may be even catastrophic. For there are children who are dare-devils—most children are so— and when a desire possesses them they are stopped by nothing in the world. Some are fond of walking along the edge of walls or on house tops; some have an impulse to jump into water directly they see it. Even there are some who love to take the risk of crossing a road when a car is passing. If such children are allowed to go their way, the experiment may prove fatal sometimes. There are people who do allow their children to have this liberty and take the risk. For they say prevention is not a cure. Children who are refused anything do not usually believe that what is refused is bad, they consider that a

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thing is called bad simply when one wishes to refuse it. So would it not be better, it is argued, to concede the liberty? The theory is that individual liberty must be respected at all costs. Past experiences should not be placed before beings that are come newly into the world; they must get their own experiences, make their own experiements free from any burden of the past. Once I remonstrated that a child should be warned about a possible accident, I was answered it was none of my business. And when I persisted saying the child might get killed, the answer was, "What if? Each one must follow his destiny. It is neither the duty nor the right of anybody to interfere in the affairs of others. If one goes on doing stupid things one will suffer the consequences oneself and most likely stop doing them of one's own accord—which is hundredfold better than being forced by others to stop." But naturally there are cases when one stops indeed, but not in the way expected or wished for.

The matter gets difficult and involved, if you make a theory and try to follow it. In reality, each case is different and to be able to deal with each adequately needs a whole life-time occupation.

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A Sign and a Symbol

It is said that if you see a shooting star and make a vow at that time, the vow is sure to be fulfilled. Is it true ?

It means that you must be able to formulate your aspiration during the time the star is visible, that is to say, a very short time. Now, if an aspiration can be formed and formulated in such a short time, it shows that the aspiration is there all the while quite at the front of your consciousness. Of course, the thing is true of the spiritual aspiration only: it is not applicable to matters of ordinary life. So I say that if you are capable of articulating your aspiration in a split second, it means that the object of your aspiration lies in front and dominates your consciousness. And necessarily whatever dominates your consciousness is likely to be quickly realised.

I had the occasion to make the experiment and have the experience. It happened exactly as you say. I saw a shooting star and as it passed, at the precise moment, leaped out of my consciousness the words: To realise for my body union with the Divine. it was done.

Obviously, the star was not the cause. It was because the thing dominated my consciousness, I thought of nothing but that, I willed nothing but that, I acted not

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but for that. Usually, it seems, it takes a whole life time to have the realisation—the minimum is thirty-five years, it is said. But it was done in my case within twelve months.

It was because I was wholly concentrated upon the aspiration that I could formulate it in the twinkling of an eye that the passage of the star represents—not as a mere vague impression—but in clear precise words: To realise for the body union with the Divine. What is important is not the star, but the aspiration. There is no need of a shooting star to be there in order to have the experience quickly, what is needed is that the whole being must concentrate its will upon one point.

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Sleep and Pain

How would one be able to sleep when one has extreme bodily pain?

That requires some kind of yogic power. The best way, the absolute one, is to get out of the body.

When the body suffers, when you have high fever, for example, when you are sick, sick to the last degree, the only thing to do then is to come out of the body, come out with your vital being. If you are a yogi and have the knowledge, you remain outside the body but just above it so that you are able to look at it. You can see your own body if the vital form in which you go out is sufficiently materialised. You see your body and with the consciousness and the power which you have then, you can direct the rays of the Force upon the spot where the body suffers. This is a top process, but it gives the absolutely sure means of getting cured. If the power and the knowledge is there, it is infallible. You can cure any disease with that and in a short time. Only it means a considerable education and training. You cannot improvise it. But as a matter of fact men help themselves naturally and automatically when the pain becomes unbearable; they faint. To faint is to get out of the body. So persons who are not too much tied down to

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the body faint away when the bodily suffering becomes too strong. Only, when you go out of the body, leaving it as an inert mass, there must be someone near sensible and intelligent enough. The body must not be shaken violently to make you wake up. If people by the side are seized by a panic and hurl buckets of water upon your head, the result may be worse. Otherwise, the fainting fit passes quietly, little by little, into a restful condition as there is no longer the consciousness recording the bodily suffering. In the so-called fit the body becomes gradually quiet and immobile, so that it may rest in spite of the suffering.

There are lesser means with lesser results. These too are not very easy either. One is to cut the connection between the brain and the part that suffers. The brain not receiving the vibration, the pain is no longer felt. In fact, this is what doctors do when they operate under anaesthesia. The nervous connection round the affected part is made insensitive and the pain is not felt or it is reduced to a minimum. But here you have to do it with your will and consciousness; and that requires an occult power. Some can do it automatically, but their number is very few. If you are unable to go so far, there is another way which should be within your reach. Do not concentrate or dwell upon your pain and suffering; withdraw your attention and direct it elsewhere. The more you think of your pain, the worse it becomes. If you are busy observing its signs and signals, almost awaiting its attack, you surely welcome it in a way, you indulge it

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and help its continuance. That is why you are advised in that condition to do some light reading or hear things read out, so that the attention may be diverted.

When you go to sleep the ideal is to enter into integral rest, that is to say, immobility of the body, peace in the vital, absolute silence in the mind and the consciousness coming out of all activity and passing into Sachchida-nanda. If you can do that, then when you get up, you get up with a feeling of extraordinary power, perfect joy and so on. But it is not easy to do it. Still it can be done. It is the ideal condition.

Generally, however, it is never like that; most often, practically the whole length of your sleep is wasted in all kinds of disorderly movements: you toss about in your bed, kick and jump and even talk and shout. That means you have no rest at all.

Usually there is a whole group of dreams, useless and tiresome, that prevent you from resting. You must avoid all that. You can avoid them, if just before you go to sleep you make a little effort at concentration, that is to say, try to be in relation with what is best in yourself, through an aspiration or a prayer. You do that and go to sleep. Now, if you have done your concentration in some way successfully, you are likely to get a kind of dream, rather experiences in sleep which you remember, which are useful indications or signs about problems for which you had had no answer; it may be on the subject of certain circumstances where you have to take a decision and are unable to do so; or it may be

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something in your consciousness which is not clear to you in your waking state, because you are not in the habit of noting or recognizing it normally, but which you feel in some way doing harm. All these things may appear to you in a revealing symbolic dream. Things are clear which were obscure before. And this does not depend upon what you have been or were doing the whole day long, but much upon the way in which you get into sleep. A minute of sincere aspiration just before going to sleep is sufficient to make of your sleep a powerful help instead of an agent for obscuration.

There is also a proper way of getting out of sleep, as there is a proper way of getting into it. Instead of jumping out of the bed as soon as you are awake or moving about in it, you should keep quiet and still as you awake; you awake slowly without the least movement in your limbs; you feel a sort of vague impression left in you of something that has happened, somthing peculiar and even strange. Keep yourself still and observe, observe closely and attentively. Slowly you perceive a kind of half memory emerging of an activity in your past night. Remain concentrated and always still and immobile, gradually something like the tail-end of a dream appears and if you pull at it, follow it up, that is to say, backward —always keeping yourself quiet—you can recollect practically the whole of your dream, quite an interesting activity of yours in the night.

You do many things at night in your sleep. You forget most of them. If however you recall them, become

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conscious of them, you can begin controlling them. Before being conscious, without being conscious of a thing, you cannot have control over it. It is by being conscious that you get the power for control. If you can control your activities in sleep, you can have a restful sleep. Sometimes when you get up you find yourself more tired than when you went to bed. It is because you are in the habit of doing very many useless things in your sleep, running about wildly in your vital, wandering chaotically in your mind etc., etc. Naturally when you get up you do not seem to have tasted any rest. Sometimes you get into bad quarters, dark and ugly regions and you struggle there, fight there, receive blows, give blows and you are prostrate in the end. All that you can avoid, when you become conscious and gain control.

* *

When one sees oneself dead or dying, it may mean several things. It may mean a spiritual death or a vital death or the death of some part in you that is to go; in the last case it means a progress in the consciousness. It may be also a premonition. The significance depends upon the context.

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The Mind's Bazar

You can't imagine what a bazar there is in the head. It is something terrible. If you look truly objectively at what passes there you will be shocked. You have then to put it in order, see into it clearly and arrange; you have to note that two contradictory ideas do not run together on parallel lines.

I know a considerable number of persons who shelter in their head contrary ideas, not at all synthesised— there is no question of synthesis here—but cohabiting like two brothers engaged in eternal quarrels and contradictions, that is to say, the two ideas cannot live together, unless you lift them up and reconcile and unify in a higher and wider view; but that means work of a superior kind. People often do not even perceive that they are contradicting themselves with their conflicting ideas, they are not disturbed in any way. If I should give you examples—they are innumerable—you would laugh at the ridiculousness of incompatible ideas associating together.

I propose to give you a task. You have ideas on things. You must surely have ideas on the world, life, the why of existence and the whence and the whither, wherefore we are here, our present occupation, our future realisation etc., etc.

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Now try to put all these ideas in front of you and then arrange them. Will you find it easy? Surely it will amuse you and you will discover amazing things. First of all, the very work itself of exposition, that is to say, simply placing the ideas side by side in front of you, all the ideas that you have on a given subject, as if you were writing out a composition given in your class, will bring to you funny revelations. If you had not already the habit of holding to a central idea, a central immutable truth, if that were possible, around which you arranged all the collateral ideas, organised them in a logical order, if, I say, you did not do anything like that before, you would find yourself, if not in a sad, at least in a funny situation. You can't imagine how many contradictory thoughts you are thinking in the course of an hour without the least surprise! For example, take this subject: "what is the goal towards which life is moving?" or "why do men take birth only to die?" —take a subject a little general and even somewhat abstract like this and not the problem of why football today and not basket-ball—things can be easily explained away there—and then try to line up all your ideas on the matter; you will see how queer the affair is.

How to distinguish between an idea that is one's own and an idea coming from elsewhere (a book or a person) ?

There is nothing like an idea belonging to oneself and an idea belonging to others. No one has an idea

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exclusively his own. There is an immensity out of which one can draw according to one's personal affinity. Ideas are a collective possession, a joint property. Only there are different stages. There is the most common or commonplace stage where all of us have our brain sunk in a crowded mass of impersonal notions. It is the stage of Mr. Everybody. The next stage is a little higher, that of thinkers, as they are called. There are other stages further up, many others, some beyond the domain of words, others still within the domain of ideas. Those who can mount sufficiently high are able to catch something that looks like light and bring it down with its packet of ideas or its bundle of thoughts. An idea brought down from a higher region organises itself, crystallises itself into a variety of thoughts that are capable of expressing the idea in different ways. Then, if you are a writer, a poet or an artist and bring it further down into more concrete forms, then you can have all kinds of expressions, infinite ways of presenting a single idea, a single small idea perhaps, but coming from a great height. If you can do that, you know also how to distinguish between the pure idea and the manner of expressing it. If you are unable to do it by yourself, you can take the help of others, you can learn from persons and books. You can, for example, note how one particular idea has been given so many different forms by different poets. There is the pure or essential idea, then there is the typal or generic idea and then the many formulations. You can exercise your mind in this way,

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teach it suppleness, subtlety, strength and other virtues,

In fact, if you wish to be truly intelligent, you must learn a bit of mental gymnastics, even as you have to do physical gymnastics if you wish to have a strong capable body. People who have never done mental gymnastics have a small elementary brain; all their life they think like children. Mental exercise means that you must know how to do it and do it seriously. First of all, it means that you must not have fixed convictions, namely, that this idea is right and that one is wrong, this formulation is correct, the other one is inexact or that this religion is true, the other is false and so on. If you go on in that train you become very soon stupid, a blockhead. What you have to do, say, in the matter of religion, is to take up all the religions one by one and see how all have expressed the same human aspiration for the Absolute of some kind. You can compare and contrast, understand, weigh and balance, the game will be extremely interesting. Now, when you have mastered all the ideas, seized all the modes of expression, you can try to go beyond, look at them and smile at the eternal discussions mankind indulges in. You are then master of your mind and no longer subject to what seems to be the commonest habit of mankind—getting into a fury simply because someone does not happen to think like you.

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Spirits in Trees

You told us the other day that there are spirits who remain bound to trees. How are they to get free ?

Why should they get free?

You told us how the spirits in the trees got freed when someone was kind to them and said prayers on their behalf.

Yes, but that was in the story. It was a Christian legend and put in that way to illustrate a lesson. It was to show that if you are wicked you suffer even after death, that it is a virtuous life that saves you from misery. In reality, however, there is no question here of sin and punishment; it is not that spirits get attached to trees in order to be punished. When a person dies, his vital being leaves the body and goes out; but it finds itself in unfamiliar and inhospitable surroundings, especially if there is no one, none among his friends and relatives upon earth, to help him in the proper way, to guide or protect him in the new country where there are hostile beings to harm. In such a situation a tree is often a very ready shelter, a big old tree with friendly branches spread out, possessing a strong vitality. It is the sap, the element of water coursing in the substance of the tree,

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that is to say, the support of its life-power, to which the vital being of the dead man is drawn as its physical support and shelter. There is no question of forced imprisonment and a desire to be freed.

Are they not harmful, these spirits?

In what way? Usually they do not seem to be so.

But we hear stories of people who are possessed by them and troubled and tortured.

Those are of a different kind. They are beings belonging to the vital world and are hostile forces. Here we were speaking of the remnants of the vital being of a dead man. But even in cases of possession by hostile forces or beings, the real truth is most often of another kind. Usually these beings or spirits, as they are called, are nothing more than creations of men. That is to say, it is fear that produces them; it is a mere mental formation which is taken to be a reality. And the greater the fear, the more concrete and effective the formation appears to be. I have had to deal with hundreds of such cases and I have found that there are very few which contain anything more than imagination. Some time ago, I was told of a tree nearby that was the haunt of a ghost. Our milkmen were afraid of the ghost and had seen it! I sent Amrita to burn some incense there and go round the tree a few times and tell the people it was

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gone. Well, it was indeed gone; for it was not a very substantial being. As I said, most of the spirits are the creations of our fear.

How long do spirits of dead people live in their trees?

That depends. There are entities that stay or live only for a short time; there are others that have a stronger formation and may stay on in their shelter for a thousand years, if the trees live to a thousand years.

Do such spirits go out of animals also and possess trees ?

Not likely. A certain growth and organisation of the vital being is necessary to be able to persist after death. The vital being of an animal is too unformed and fluid, too bound to the body to continue as an independent entity. When an animal dies its vitality almost immediately disintegrates and merges into the general forces of Nature. It is only in man where there is a mental being to organise the vitality into some sort of an individualised form that the persistence of that form is. possible after the dissolution of the body.

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ARE NOT DOGS MORE FAITHFUL THAN MEN?

Yes, for it is their nature to be faithful and they have not man's mental complications. What prevents men from becoming faithful is the complexes of their mind. Most men are not faithful because they are afraid of being dupes, afraid of being cheated, exploited. Also behind the faithfulness they have there is always a large dose of egoism hidden, there is a bargaining more or less conscious, a give and take: 'I am faithful to you. You too must be faithful to me, in other words, you must be nice to me, must not exploit me etc.' Dogs do not have these complexities, for they have a very rudimentary mind. They have not this marvellous capacity of reasoning which drives man to commit such foolishness. But, of course, we cannot go back to the dog state. What we have to do is to rise higher, to become a super-man, to have the dog's quality on a higher level, if I am allowed to say so, i.e. instead of being faithful instinctively, blindly, half-consciously, through a kind of binding need, it must be a conscious, willing, deliberate faithfulness, above all, free from egoism. There is a point where all the virtues meet: it is the point that is beyond egoism. If we take faithfulness or devotion or love or

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the will to serve,—all these when they are above the level of egoism are similar to one another in the sense that they give themselves and ask no return. And if you get up a step higher, you see they are done not through the sense of duty or abnegation but out of an intense joy that carries its own reward, which needs nothing in exchange, for it is joy itself. But for that you should have risen very high where there is no longer any turn-back on oneself, these movements that draw you down—that kind of sympathy for oneself, the self-pity that one feels for oneself and says "Poor me!" This is a most degrading sentiment and it pulls you immediately into a dark hole.

You must leave that far behind if you will have the joy of faithfulness, the joy of self-giving, that does not notice at all whether it is properly received or not, whether there is an answer or not. Never to wait for a return in exchange for what one does, wait for nothing, not through asceticism or the sense of sacrifice, but because of the joy of being in that consciousness: that is sufficient, that is much more than what one can receive from anything outside.

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The Work Here

From the worldly standpoint, from the point of view of result achieved, certainly things can be done better. But I am speaking of the effort put in, effort in the deepest sense of the word. Work is prayer done with the body. With that effort in your work the Divine is satisfied, the eye of the Consciousness that has viewed it is indeed pleased. Not that from the human standpoint one cannot do better. For us, however, this particular endeavour is one among many; it is only one movement in our sadhana. We are engaged in many other things. To raise one particular item of work to something like perfection requires time and means and resources which are not at our disposal. But we do not seek perfection in one thing, our aim is an integral achievement.

An outside view may find many things to criticise and criticise much, but from the inner view what has been done has been done well. In an outside view, you come with all kinds of mental, intellectual formations and find there is nothing uncommon in what is done here. But thereby you miss what is behind: the sadhana. A deeper consciousness would see the march towards a realisation that surpasses all. The outside view does not see the life spiritual; it judges by its own smallness.

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There are people who write wanting to join our University and they ask what kind of diploma or degree we prepare for, the career we open out. To them I say: go elsewhere, please, if you want that; there are many other places, much better than ours, even in India, in that respect. We do not have their equipment or magnificence. You will get there the kind of success you look for. We do not compete with them. We move in a different sphere, on a different level.

But this does not mean that I ask you to feel superior to others. The true consciousness is incapable of feeling superior. It is only the small consciousness that seeks to show superiority. Even a child is more developed than such a being; for it is spontaneous in its movements. Rise above all smallness. Do not be interested in any other thing than your relation with the Divine, what you wish to do for Him. That is the only thing interesting.

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THOUGHT AND THOUGHT-POWER

Thought the Creator

Human thought always creates forms in the mental world. It is a creative force. You are creating thought-forms constantly and sending them out into the atmosphere around; they go abroad to do their work. You are yourself surrounded always by such formations. No doubt there are people who cannot think clearly; they form around them only a kind of whirl. But they who think clearly and strongly create thought-forms that go out to accomplish their task and return when they are re-thought. There are cases of people who are troubled by their own formations that return to them or upon them as if to possess them and which they cannot get rid of; they do not know how to unmake a form which they make. When you have made a particularly strong formation, it remains always linked to you; it comes back again and again hitting your head and gathering force. In the end it is a necessity to you. There is a whole world of mystery to learn in this matter. Men live in ignorance; they have powers of which they are thoroughly unconscious or know very little.

Buddhists, I mean those who are in the more orthodox tradition, do not believe in God or an eternal Reality; they do not believe in gods either, that is to say, in beings who are truly divine. They, however, know admirably to use the mind and the mind's power. The Buddhist

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discipline makes you master of the mental instrument. A person following the Buddhist discipline came to me once and said that he had made an experiment: he had formed a being with his thought, he had created something like a Mahatma. He knew and it is a proved fact that these mental formations after a time begin to have a personal life, independently of the author,—although they may be connected with him, yet they are quite independent, in the sense that they have a will of their own. But now he was facing a formidable difficulty. He said: "Do you know I have formed my Mahatma so well that he has become a personality quite independent of me and comes all the while to trouble me? He comes, scolds me for this and that, advises me in this matter and that and wants to control my life altogether. I am unable to get rid of him. I find it extremely difficult and do not know how to go about it. As I say, my Mahatma has become extremely troublesome. He does not leave me to be at rest. He interferes in all my activities, prevents me from doing my work and yet I know it is my own creation and I am unable to do away with it." He explained to me how he tried to get rid of the thing. I then told him it was because he did not know the trick. I showed him the process and the next morning he came happy and beaming, saying "it has left". He could not cut the connection; even then cutting the connection is not sufficient, for the being would continue to live apart and independent. What is needed is to re-absorb what one created, to swallow what was put out.

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Thought and Imagination

When you think of a person or a thing you are immediately there and come into contact with the object of your thought. But this happens in the thought world only; you know nothing of the vital or physical context of the object. Thought is conscious of thought only in the mental world; by your thought you can be conscious of the mental atmosphere of the distant object, of the thought of the person to whom you go, but nothing else, absolutely nothing of his vital or physical.

If you want to know of the vital you must go to the object vitally; it means an exteriorisation that leaves the body at least three-fourths in trance. And if you want to see things physically, you will have to go out in your most material subtle physical; that leaves the body in an entirely catalyptic condition. These things cannot be done without someone by your side who has the right knowledge and who can protect you.

But the mental exteriorisation happens constantly. It puts you in relation with the mental world. If you are very conscious and the person you see in thought is also very conscious, then you can know of the ideas and opinions which the person might form at that time, but even then only indirectly, you do not know directly.

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When you imagine a thing, it means that you make a mental formation which may be near to the truth or far from it according to the quality of your formation. There are people who have this power of formation to such an extent that they are capable of realising what they imagine. They imagine some thing and they make such a strong well-shaped formation that they succeed in materialising it. They are truly creators. There are not many like that, but there surely are a few.

You can meet a dead person also in your thought if he continues to be in the mental world; you can be in contact with his mind and have a sort of mental vision of his life there. But if he is gone to the psychic world, then thinking of him is not sufficient; you must know how to go into the psychic world and meet him there.

The mind has its own power of vision; it is not the vision of the physical eyes, but it is yet vision, perception through forms. It is not imagination which is a quite different faculty. Suppose you figure to yourself an ideal being to whom you attribute all conceptions of ideality you have. You say he must be like this, he must be like that, his thoughts are like this, his character like that; you fill up all the details and build up the being. Well, that is the work of imagination. Literary men, novel-writers, always do this kind of construction. Of course, there are writers who take up things from life; but there are others who imagine things and impose them upon life. A character, a concourse of circumstances, a whole chain of events, they spin out of their head.

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And if they are powerful and possess sufficient creative force, it is quite possible there may be one day actually a physical human being embodying the type imagined.

You can make use of imagination for a high purpose. With its help you can recreate your inner and outer life. You can wholly build your life if you know how to use it and have the power. As a matter of fact, it is the most ordinary and primary way of creating and forming things in the world. I had always the impression that if one had not the capacity of imagination, one would not make any progress. Your imagination always goes ahead of your life. When you think of yourself, usually you imagine what you would like to become —that comes first, the prevision, and then you follow it up; you continue to imagine and realise, realise and imagine. Imagination opens the way to realisation. It is very difficult to move unimaginative people. They see only what is just in front of their nose, they feel only what is there at a given moment. They cannot advance, they are blocked by the immediate present. It is imagination that makes the whole difference.

Men of science also have and should have a large power of imagination; otherwise they would discover nothing. Imagination, is in reality, the capacity to project oneself out of realised things towards things realisable and pull them in by the very power of projection. It is true there is a progressive and there is a regressive imagination. There are people who always imagine all possible catastrophes and have the power even to make them

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come. However, imagination has its good use. It sends out, as it were, antennae into a world that is not yet realised, and they catch hold of something there and draw it here. Naturally, it means an addition to earth's atmosphere, addition of things that tend towards manifestation. Imagination then is an instrument that one can train and discipline and use at will. It is one of the principal faculties that should be developed and made serviceable.

Even, you can imagine the Divine and come into contact with Him. You do in fact come into contact with that which you imagine. Do you know you cannot imagine anything that is not somewhere? It may not exist here upon earth, but it is and must be elsewhere. As I say, it is impossible to imagine anything that is not contained in the universe in principle at least. Otherwise it would not be there even as an idea.

The universe is progressive. That is to say, more and more things constantly manifest themselves there. Now, imagination is a faculty by which you go beyond the range of manifested things; if you have progressed so far as to imagine things that are not yet manifested, you already help in bringing down these things and making them part of the manifested reality. Naturally, you must know how to go beyond the manifested universe in order to be able to imagine what is not there. And there are many, many such things.

First of all, you must know how to get beyond the terrestrial manifestation, in order to be able to imagine

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a new thing in it. And how many millions of years has earth existed! What has been the output of new things there? Countless, for no two things upon earth are exactly the same, although they may be very similar. It is not easy with your mind to get out of the earthly atmosphere. But if you have succeeded in doing that, you have to get out of the universal life. To enter into contact with all that has been here upon earth since the beginning of its appearance till the present day and then to enter into contact with the universal of which the earth forms only a tiny particle from its beginning to its formulation today—this is not sufficient. You have still to go beyond, beyond the universal, into the transcendent, the unmanifest. Then you can think of imagining and bringing down something new into the manifestation and upon earth. Not that one cannot do this. But it is not so easy.

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Poetry and Poetic Inspiration

I have said: "Poetry is sensuality of the mind". How is it so? It is because poetry is in relation with the forms and images of ideas—forms, images, sensations, impressions, emotions attached to ideas are the sensual or, if you prefer to call it, the sensuous side of things. All such relations are sensuousness. And poetry concerns itself with this idea of mind and thought. It approaches the world of ideas through their appearances, through the play of sensations and emotions around them. It is not like philosophy or metaphysics which endeavours to look into the inside of ideas. Poetry, on the other hand, cannot be poetry unless it evokes, that is to say, unless it gives a form, a sensuous form to the idea. I have used an epigrammatic phrase to express this truth and even chosen the stronger word to give an edge to it. People are called sensual when they are occupied solely with the sensations of the physical life, with the forms and formations and movements of the material world, when they live with their senses and enjoy the things of the senses. The same tendency instead of going out towards the external life, the physical world, when it turns towards objects of the mind, towards ideas gives rise to poetry. Poetry is a world under the aspect of the beauty

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of form. It expresses the beauty of an idea, the harmony of rhythm of a thought, giving all that a concrete shape or image: it becomes a play of images, a play of sounds, a play of words. Thus instead of a sensuality of matter, we have a sensuality of the mind. I have not taken the word in a pejorative sense, nor in a moral sense; it is simply descriptive.

I do not mean, in other words, that such a view, the poetic view, necessarily prevents you from seeing the truth of things. It only describes the way of the poets' approach as poet. Indeed, if it were a choice between reading a book of good poetry and reading a book of metaphysics, personally I would prefer poetry, for that is less arid! My definition of poetry, I assure you, is not a condemnation, it is only a description, a statement of fact, namely, that poetry is the sensual or sensuous approach to truth. It is perhaps a somewhat paradoxical way of putting the thing; it is meant to strike the thought, to awaken it to the perception of a reality which is usually obscured by the habitual, traditional or "classical" way of thinking.

If you mean by inspiration that the poet does not think when he writes a poem, that is to say, he has gone beyond all thought, has made his mind silent, silent and immobile, has opened himself to inner or higher regions and writes almost automatically, well, such a thing happens perhaps once a thousand years. It is not a common phenomenon. A Yogi has the power to do that. What you normally mean, however, by an inspired poet is

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something quite different. People who have some kind of genius, who have an opening into other and higher regions are called "inspired"; persons who have made some discovery are also included in that category. Each time you are in relation with a thing belonging to a domain superior to the normal human consciousness, you are inspired. And when you are not totally bound to the very ordinary level you do receive "inspirations" from above. It is the same in the case of a poet. The source of his creation is elsewhere up above the ordinary mind; for that he need not possess an empty vacant mind.

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Divine Living

We always give the name "Divine" to all that we are not and want to become, all that seems infinitely higher than not only everything we have done but everything we can possibly do, all that is beyond our present capacity and conception.

I am perfectly sure that if we went back into the past a few thousands of years, we would find that when one spoke of the Divine it was of a being somewhat like one of the "overmental" gods. But now, the way of living proper to these overmental divinities who governed the earth and created many things upon earth for a very long time, seems to us very inferior to what we conceive as the Supramental. This Supramental again which we now call the Divine and which we seek to bring down upon earth will have the same effect upon us a few thousand years hence as the Overmental has upon us now.

In other words, in the manifestation, in his Self-expression the Divine is progressive. Outside and beyond manifestation, He is something we cannot conceive of. But when He manifests Himself in this status of constant becoming, He manifests more and more of Himself, as if He has reserved for the final end the most beautiful things of His being.

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As the world progresses, what He expresses of Himself in the world becomes more and more the Divine.

Sri Aurobindo has used the word Supramental in order to be clear to people who live in the evolutionary external consciousness and who are aware of the way in which the terrestrial world has developed, telling them that it is something greater than the creation of man whom he always calls mental being. He calls it Supramental to say that it is beyond mind.

But we can also say that it is something more divine than what has been manifested before. For the Infinity is there; that has no limit. Thus there will always be a growing perfection. What appears to us as imperfect today must have appeared as something perfect, to which certain epochs of history yearned and aspired.

And there is no reason why the movement should stop. If it stopped it would mean an end of things—a new pralaya.

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Perfection and Progress

Perfection is a relative term. A thing may be perfect in relation to the present or the past; it may not be so in relation to what is to come. Creation is a perpetual movement, a perpetual progression. Each time a new consciousness manifested upon earth, it was very natural for men of the epoch to have the impression that it was the final definitive realisation, at least a very great progress.

Still we must note that even for an animal, say an elephant or a dog, human capacities appear as marvellous; they feel, the dogs do, that man possesses almost divine powers. So men too from the stage where they are have a hint of things beyond; that is why we are not wholly satisfied, we have the feeling in spite of all things achieved that there is something else which escapes, indeed the true thing escapes, we turn around it, but never touch it. It means that man is ready for a further progress. If it were not so, if he were satisfied only with what he can do, he would try to do that alone, better and better perhaps, but in the same groove. However, it is not that: he seeks something else, something quite different, which is truly true, on which one can count, which does not crash down when one supports oneself

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upon it, something durable, permanent, the Rock of Ages. This need of eternity, of an absolute good and absolute beauty awakens exactly at the moment when one is ready to receive a new consciousness.

For a very long time, perhaps from the very beginning —I do not mean from the beginning of human evolution, for there have been earlier periods when, before the true man appeared, intermediate beings at first were tried who were much nearer the animal; I mean the beginning of a sufficiently developed human form when it became ready to receive something from above—there have been always and there are still individuals who carry in them this need of the eternal and the absolute. It is only little by little, very gradually, through cycles of enlightenment and obscurity that something like a collective consciousness in humanity awakes to the need of such a higher existence. And today this necessity seems evidently very general, cutting across all turmoils and stupidities of mankind: that shows that the time is near.

Yes, for a very long time, men were told, "It will be, it will be", were given the promise. It was promised, thousands and thousands of years ago, that a new consciousness, a new world, something of the Divine would manifest itself upon earth; it was always in the future, somewhere in the revolution of the ages. One had not this feeling, this sensation that it is here and now.

By far the larger part of humanity, in fact, most of it, need to make a very great effort to imagine what the future may be like. Its consciousness is so much tied

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down to what is that it finds it difficult even to imagine that things can be otherwise. When what shall be becomes, for at least the consciousness of a group of individuals, an inevitable necessity and what has been and is appears to it as an absurdity that cannot last, then and then only comes the moment for the change to happen, not before.

The question still remains whether the thing can happen and will happen individually before it happens collectively. But no individual realisation even can be complete or approach perfection, unless and until it is in harmony with a group consciousness representing a new world. There is always an interdependence between the individual and the collective so much so that an individual realisation is bound to be restricted and diminished in an irresponsive atmosphere. Earth life as a whole has to follow a certain curve of progress in order that a new world and a new consciousness may appear in it.

So the future realisation does depend, partially at least, upon you, individually and collectively. Have you ever tried to conceive what the new consciousness may mean, what the new race and the new world would look like?

It is evident that the advent of man upon the earth has changed the terrestrial conditions. One cannot say that this has been to the greatest good of all, for it meant much suffering in many places. Also it is evident that the complication which the human being has brought with him into life has not always been favourable to him

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or to others. Bur from another point of view it did mean a progress, a marked progress among the lower species. Man mixed himself up with the life of animals, with the life of plants, even with the life of metals and minerals; it was not, as I said, to the great joy of all those with whom he busied himself; but in any case, their conditions of life were changed by this interference. In the same way, it is likely that the supramental being, whatever he may be, when he comes, will change considerably the life upon earth. We cherish this hope in our heart and in our mind that all the ills the earth suffers from will be, if not completely cured, at least to a large extent alleviated and that conditions of living here will be more pleasant and harmonious, at least tolerable for all. That is quite possible. In man, the mental consciousness that he incarnated acted, by the very force of its nature, for its own satisfaction, for its own growth, without much consideration for the consequences of its actions. The Supramental, on the other hand, will act differently; that is our hope, at least.

Human life, however, is brief and naturally there is a tendency in man to shorten the distances in proportion to his dimensions. Still there will come a time when the thing will happen; there will be a moment or a movement that will at last land into the reality. Once upon a time there came a moment when the mental being could appear upon earth. The start may be poor, very incomplete, very partial, but after all there was the start. Why should not the same thing occur now?

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to me—they who are more for profiting by what they possess than for risking to lose all in the hope of something that may or may not happen tomorrow, I assure you, such people will not notice the change even if it happens right under their nose. They will say, "It is all right, we do not care, there is nothing to regret". Quite possibly; but after all, they might have to regret, we do not know.

In any case, that is what I mean by sincerity. That is to say, if you regard the new realisation as the only thing truly worth living for, if what is is intolerable, not only for oneself, perhaps not so much for oneself as for the whole world, one feels the need of it if one is not small and egoistic; one feels that the present has lasted too long and one can do nothing but take up all that one is, all that one can and throw oneself completely—head foremost, without looking backward, without considering what may happen or not—into the adventure. It is far better to jump into the abyss, than to stand on the brink shivering.

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Psychological Perfection

There is a flower to which we have given this name. It is the familiar Champa. The flower has five petals. Each petal represents a quality or movement of consciousness, the five qualities or movements making up the psychological perfection. In the beginning I named them(1) Surrender, (2) Sincerity, (3) Faith, (4) Devotion and (5) Aspiration. Of course the meaning can be changed. In fact, when I give the flower to someone, I do not always mean the same qualities. I change according to the need of the person and at the moment. However we can have all the same a general scheme. In any case, in all combinations and to whomsoever I may give, the first among the qualities is and must always be Sincerity. For, if there is no sincerity, one cannot move even half a step. So sincerity is the first thing necessary and should be always there.

This can be translated by another word, if you like. That would be transparence. Let me explain.

When someone comes to me and I look at him, I look into his eyes, straight into his eyes. If the person is sincere, that is to say, transparent, I enter into him through his eyes and I see his soul clearly. But when I look and see in the eyes a cloud, and then a screen or continuing

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farther I meet a wall or something very black and when I find I have to pass through all that and drill holes at places to go through, even so at the last minute I am not sure if I do not stand against a bronze wall that refuses all entry, then in such cases I do not find the soul and the person I can declare to be not sincere. Literally, such a person is not transparent. So, then, this is the first thing.

The next item which is also obviously necessary for all progress is Faith. There is also another word for it which although seemingly limited, possesses for me at least a greater importance; I mean, trust. If your faith is not made of a complete trust in the Divine or if you begin to lose the trust, then you gradually lose faith in the Divine Power or in the Divine Goodness or in the trust that the Divine has in you. These are the three great stumbling-blocks.

It happens at times, if not quite often, that starting with a faith which you describe unshakable, the faith that the Divine alone does everything and can do everything, that whatever occurs in me or in others, everywhere, is the work of the Divine and of none other than the Divine, you continuing to the logical end, apparently at least, till after a time you begin to accuse the Divine of the most frightful misdeeds, make him a veritable demon being the author or abettor of all the evils in the world.

Or you say, you have faith in the Divine, but as to this world, you know what it is and you put no trust in it.

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You say: "In the first instance, I suffer much, I am unlucky, much more unlucky than any other person"— one is always more miserable than one's neighbour, be sure—"life is unkind to me. Now, if the Divine is divine, all kindness, all generosity, all love and harmony, how is it that I am so unfortunate? The Divine must then be powerless. Otherwise, how can he leave me in un-happiness, if he is so kind?" That is the second stumbling-block. The third one is this. There are people who are too modest, full of an excessive and misguided humility, who say: "Surely the Divine has rejected me, I am good for nothing, He can do nothing with me, it is better for me to give it up all." Such difficulties will always crop up, if along with faith you do not have complete trust in the Divine.

Next in the series comes Devotion, Certainly, devotion is very good; but here too, unless it is accompanied with many other things, it can lead you into much error. For with devotion one keeps one's ego also. Out of devotion you may behave most egoistically. You think of your devotion, only of your devotion, that is to say, you think of yourself alone, you do not think of others, of the world, of the work that you do and ought to do -you become formidably egoistic. And when you see that the Divine, for some reason or other, does not answer your devotion with an enthusiasm you expect of him, you despair and fall into one or all of the three difficulties I spoke of just now. Either the Divine must be cruel-we know of devotees who throw all their

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anger upon the Divine, accusing him of neglect and cruelty; or then they think, "I must have made a grave blunder, I am hopeless in his eyes and I am rejected."

Now, there is a movement which one can have and constantly along with devotion, as complementary to it—a sense of gratitude, that the Divine exists and one feels a kind of gratefulness, born of wonder, which fills you truly with a sublime joy; the very fact that the Divine exists, that there is something in the universe which is the Divine, that it is not merely a monstrosity that we see here below, brings a flow of unspeakable gladness in you. Every time the least thing puts you in contact with this sublime reality of the Divine's existence, whether directly or indirectly, your heart is filled with a feeling so intense, so marvellous, the feeling precisely of a profound gratitude which has of all things the sweetest savour, that no other joy can bring. So I say devotion by itself is incomplete, it must have gratitude as its companion.

We come to the next term. I spoke to you once of courage; I said courage means the taste for adventure, the supreme adventure. This taste for the supreme adventure is Aspiration—aspiration that seizes you wholly and throws you without calculation or reserve, without the possibility of withdrawal, into the great adventure of the discovery of the Divine, the great adventure of meeting the Divine and the still greater adventure of realising the Divine. It means throwing oneself into an unknown venture without looking backward,

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without asking even for a moment what is going to happen—for if you ask where you are going to fall, you never start, you remain fixed where you are, your both feet firmly rooted on the spot, fearing lest you lose your balance. That is why I call the thing courage. But truly it is aspiration. The two go together. True aspiration is something full of courage.

We have till now, then, four elements. The fifth one I wish to add is Endurance. For, if you are not capable of facing your difficulties without getting discouraged, without abandoning it, because it is too difficult, and if you are not able to bear blows, pocket them and go on never minding—for the blows come because of your faults and mistakes—you cannot go very far: at the first turning where you lose sight of your small habitual life, you despair and give up the game.

Endurance in its physical expression is perseverance. That is to say, you must be prepared to do a thousand times, if necessary, the same thing over and over again. You take a step forward, you think you are firmly placed; but there will always crop up something or other which brings back the old difficulty. You think you have solved the problem, you will have to solve it again: it will come in a slightly different form, but it is the same problem. You must be ready to face the problem, go through the same difficulties a million times. That is how you are sure to arrive at the goal.

We have left out one very important factor—Surrender. Now Sri Aurobindo says that surrender is the first and

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absolute condition for doing Yoga. Without it there is no Yoga. So we can say that it is not one of the qualities required, but that it is the primary indispensable attitude for one to be able to begin Yoga. If you have not decided to surrender you cannot start on the path. But to make this surrender total and complete all the five that we have enumerated are needed. This is then what I propose. We put Surrender on the top at the head; for to do the integral Yoga, one must first of all take the resolution to surrender entirely to the Divine, there is no other way, that is the one way. Afterwards, one must have the five psychological perfections.

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The Origin of Desire

From where does desire come? Buddha said that it came from Ignorance. It is almost that. Desire is something in the being which imagines that it requires an object other than itself for its satisfaction. This is sheer ignorance, proved by the fact that in 99 cases out of a hundred when one has the thing desired, one no more cares for it.

At its very origin, I think, it was an obscure need for growth or increase. In the lowest forms of life we find love transformed into an instinctive and irresistible need for enlarging, swelling, absorbing, adding to it another body. This need to take in is desire. So perhaps if you go back far enough into the last depths of inconscience, you will see that the ultimate source of desire is love: it is love in its most dark and inconscient form. It is, as I said, a need for accretion, an attraction for an outside object in order to embrace it, swallow it, make it part of itself and so grow bigger. Now, suppose you have before you something beautiful, harmonious, pleasing: if you have the true consciousness, you enjoy and are happy to the full, by simply looking at the thing, by having an inner contact in consciousness with the beauty and harmony that is there. And there the matter ends. You have the joy and that is all. Such a movement is very common in the artist. He sees a beautiful

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person, he has the joy of observing the grace of the form, the harmony of the movements and all that. But it does not go beyond. He is perfectly happy, perfectly satisfied when he has seen something beautiful.

An ordinary consciousness, on the contrary, I mean, very ordinary, flat as ordinary things are, when it sees something beautiful, whether it is a material object or a person, it immediately jumps at it, shouting, "I must-have it!" It is pitiable, isn't it? And even then with such a consciousness you cannot enjoy beauty, for the anguish of desire will pursue you. You lose true enjoyment but do not get anything in return. There is no happiness in desiring something. It only puts you in an unhappy state. Buddha also said that there was a greater joy in overcoming a desire than in satisfying it. Everybody can make this experiment and have the experience. It is-quite interesting to do so.

When you give up a desire, there occurs at the moment an inner communion with your psychic being and that is why one gets a greater joy in rejecting a desire than in fulfilling it. Besides, when you do satisfy your desire always there is a bitter after-taste somewhere. There is no desire which when satisfied does not leave this bitterness in you, as when you have taken too sweet a thing, the mouth becomes full of a bitter taste. The nature of desire is like that. You must try to throw it away, but sincerely. You must not pretend doing it and keep the thing in a corner. In that case it will surely bring misery to you.

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III

SADHANA

Asceticism

You have seen Sannyasins lying upon nails. Why do they do that? Perhaps to prove their saintliness. But when they do so in public, well, the suspicion is legitimate that it is something like a pose. There are some perhaps who do the thing sincerely and seriously, that is to say, they do not do merely to make a show. In their case we might ask why they do so. They say it is to prove to themselves their detachment from the body. There are others: they go a little further and say that one must make the body suffer in order to free the soul. But I tell you that the vital has a taste for suffering and imposes suffering on the body because of this perverse taste for suffering. I have seen children who, when they got hurt, would press the part hurt in order to get more pain and it was a pleasure to them. I have seen bigger persons also doing the same thing—morally I mean. It is a very well-known fact. I always tell people 'If you are unhappy, it is because you want to be unhappy. If you suffer, it is because you like suffering, otherwise you would not have the thing.' I call it an unhealthy state; for it is contrary to harmony and beauty; it is a land of unhealthy need for strong sensations. Do you know, China is a country where they have invented the

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most atrocious kinds of torture, unthinkable ways? When I was in Japan I asked a Japanese who liked the Chinese very much, why it was so. He told me: 'It is because the people of the Far East, including the Japanese, possess very dull sensibility. They feel very little; unless the suffering is very strong they feel nothing." They were obliged to use their intelligence for the discovery of extremely strong sufferings. Well, all people who are inconscient or tamasic, the more inconsicnet they are the greater the tamas,have their sensibility blunted; they need strong sensations if they have to feel them. This is what usually makes them cruel, because cruelty gives very strong sensations. The nerve tension produced in you when you impose suffering on some one, well, it does bring a sensation: they need that in order to feel, otherwise they would not feel. It is for that reason that whole races are particularly cruel. They are inconscient, inconscient vitally. They may not be unconscious mentally or otherwise. But they are unconscious vitally and physically, physically above all.

If one has a sense of beauty can he be cruel ?

It is a psychological problem. It depends upon the region where there is the sense of beauty. There may be a physical sense of beauty, a vital sense of beauty and a mental sense of beauty. If you have the moral sense of beauty, that is to say, a sense of decency and nobility, you can never be cruel. You will be always generous;

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your movements will consist of fine gestures. But, as I say often, man is composed of many different bits pieced together. For example, I frequented very much the artists. I knew all the great artists of the end of the last century and the beginning of the present. I lived among them. They had really a great sense of beauty. But morally some were very cruel. It is because when you see an artist in his study at work you find him living in an atmosphere of great beauty, but when you see the gentleman at home, he is a different person, having very little contact with the artist he was. Here he becomes vulgar and commonplace. Many of them are indeed like that. But there are always exceptions. Some have a unified personality, that is to say, they live their art and are truly generous, fine.

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ARE NOT THE ASCETIC MEANS HELPFUL AT TIMES?

I do not think. You cure nothing in that way. You give yourself the illusion that you are progressing, but you are really freed of nothing. The proof is that as soon as you stop the practices, the old things come back violently with a vengeance.

But naturally all depends upon the meaning you attach to the word. If it means not yielding to your desires, then it is not asceticism, it is common sense, it is good sense. By asceticism people usually understand fasting, bearing biting cold or burning heat, lying on a bed of sharp nails, that is to say, torturing the body in some way or other. That gives you only self-importance or spiritual egoism, nothing more. You acquire no true control or mastery in this way. People do it because it is so simple and easy, because it satisfied your vanity. You make a show of your ascetic virtues and under the guise hide many other things.

It is much more difficult, however, to master one's impulses quietly, deliberately, prevent them from bursting out instead of mortifying the body with ascetic feats. It is much more difficult not to be attached to things that one possesses than to possess nothing. Yet

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it is a simple truth that has been recognised through ages. To be without possessions or to reduce one's possession to a minimum is easy: difficult it is not to be attached to whatever you happen to possess. It means a higher degree of moral value. Try to do this simply and you will know what it costs: when a thing comes to you, accept it and use it and if it goes away, for some reason or other, let it go, without regret, without trying to hold it back; not to refuse it when it comes, not to regret when it leaves—naturally, I speak of material objects, things required for use in life.

Physical asceticism does not cure. For the defects are within. You are afraid of contacts from outside and you go to caves and jungles and hilltops, to live all by yourself. But you need no borrowing from others; you carry a sufficient load yourself. In fact if they were not in you, you would not have even detected them in others. You catch the infection from outside, simply because you carry the germs inside. Great waves of passion, one can say with much truth, roll through men, they are not generated in them. But if there is anyone perfectly pure, with no possibility of any passion in him, then such waves may be passing across for centuries together, he will not be affected or touched by them. He may see them, look at them as they pass, like a storm across the sky, but he will not feel.

When there is an answering vibration in us to the vibration outside, it means that the vibration is already there within, otherwise no outside vibration can enter

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or make an impression. The explanation of a panic —a general fear entering into each and every one of a crowd—lies there. A panic, however, can be stopped, if there were one or two who can resist, who are not touched, who are outside the vibrations. Such individuals can save the situation and prevent the stampede. The thing has happened often. A movement, a vibration, a force is contagious, because the ground of contagion is already there.

Why does not the effort towards progress come always spontaneously, especially for us who are here in the Ashram ?

It is because the physical nature in man is usually tamasic. Effort is natural to the vital. But the vital generally makes the effort for its own satisfaction. I do not think that the physical nature left to itself moves spontaneously in the direction of effort; it needs some activity but of a subdued kind.

Here the thing is somewhat different. The principle of education or training followed here is that of liberty. Life is organised on the basis of maximum freedom; in other words, rules and regulations, injunctions and prohibitions are reduced to a minimum. If you compare our way with that followed by parents in the world with their constant admonitions: don't do this, that is forbidden, must do this but not that etc., etc., you will find the difference. At the school and the college, everywhere, there are rules infinitely more strict than are found here.

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So, because no absolute conditions are put upon you for your progress, you do it when it pleases you and you don't do when it does not please you; you take things quite easily.

Of course there are some who do make the effort spontaneously. And that from the spiritual point of view has an infinitely greater value. You make the progress, because you feel within you the need to do so, because it is an impulse that wells up from your depths, not because you are driven by a compelling force outside. What you do spontaneously and sincerely of your own accord is something part and grain of yourself. You do a thing not because if you do it you will be rewarded and if you do not do you will be punished. It might happen however sometimes that something comes to you or into you and gives you the impression that your effort is appreciated, but the effort is not due to that. Indeed, things are arranged in such a way here that the satisfaction of having done and done well is the best reward one has and one punishes oneself thoroughly by doing badly or not doing; no other punishment can be more real or more concrete. All this is immensely significant and valuable from the standpoint of spiritual growth, much more than things produced by external regulation and pressure.

What is exactly a spiritual experience?

It is something which puts you in contact with a consciousness higher than that you have ordinarily. You five

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in a certain state and you do not even know what it is like. That is the ordinary consciousness. Suddenly you become conscious within you of something very different and much superior — that is a spiritual experience, whatever it may be. You may formulate it in a mental idea or you might not, you may explain it or you may not, it may last or it may not, it may be quite momentary. But if there is this difference in the essential quality of the consciousness, signifying something coming from above, from a greater height, something pure and true, purer and truer than anything you normally experience, that I call spiritual experience, although there are a thousand things that belong to that category.

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Human Birth

Last week I spoke of birth and how a soul enters into a body. I told you that the body is formed in a very unsatisfactory manner almost in the case of every person, the exceptions are so rare that one need not mention them. I told you that because of this obscure birth man is made to carry with him quite a bundle of things which later on he has generally to get rid of, if he wishes to progress truly in life. I told you in effect that you are made to come by force, conditions are imposed upon you by force, and by force you obey the laws of heredity. Now, I am asked who or what is it that forces? I shall answer as clearly as possible.

The body is formed by a man and a woman who are the father and the mother; these when they form the body have no means to ask of the being whom they are bringing into the world whether he likes it or whether it is agreeable to his destiny. They impose upon the body, by the force of necessity, an atavism, an environment and subsequently an education which are almost always obstacles to future growth. A growing soul or a soul full-grown taking birth in a body has to fight against these circumstances that are forced upon him by the animal birth in order to find his true path and discover his own self in its fullness.

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It is possible, however, for the parents, instead of doing the thing in the animal way, driven by mere instinct and desire, most of the time even without wanting it, to do it with a conscious will, aspiring, praying almost that the body they are about to bring forth should be a form suitable to clothe a soul coming at their call. I have known people,—there are not many, of course, still there are some,—who chose especial circumstances, prepared themselves, holding an attitude of concentration, meditation and aspiration, invoking some exceptional being to come into the body they were to form. For that one must have also an occult knowledge which people generally do not possess.

In ancient times, in some civilisations and even now in some countries, the expectant woman is put specially in a surrounding of beauty and harmony and peace and ease and very normal physical conditions so that the coming child may be formed under the best circumstances. Evidently this is as it should be, for it is within human possibilities. Human beings have developed enough not to consider it as an exceptional thing. And yet in fact, it is an exceptional thing, for there are very few people who think of it, most are in the habit of producing children without giving a thought to it. But the least that is expected of man is that he should be somewhat conscious and do things he has to do in the best of conditions.

Now, a fully formed conscious soul wanting to take birth looks generally from its psychic domain for a

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corresponding psychic light upon some place on earth. In its previous birth, before leaving the earthly atmosphere, it chose, as the result of its total experience in that life, the conditions of its future life, not in details, but more or less in a general way. Such cases are very exceptional. We here perhaps can speak of it, but for the majority of the human population, even among the most educated, the question does not arise.

Normally we are dealing with a soul that is growing, which is in the process of its growth. Now, there are all the stages of growth, from the tiniest spark that is becoming a little light up to the fully conscious and fully formed being. This ascent of the soul in order to become a mature conscious being, having its own will and deciding its own destiny, takes thousands of years.

When, however, it is a free and conscious soul that seeks to take a body again upon earth, it begins to work upon the body even before the birth. Such being the case, it has no reason not to accept the inconveniences that result from the ignorance of the parents. It has chosen its place for a reason which is a reason not of ignorance: it saw a light—which may be simply a light of possibility; but there was a light and that is why it came there. And when from the domain of the psychic it looks upon the earth and has chosen its place of birth, the choice has sufficient discernment in it not to have made a gross mistake.

In any case, even in the very best of situations, when a soul comes down consciously and when it has consciously

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worked in the formation of the physical body, so long as the body is formed in the usual animal way, the soul will have to struggle and to correct all that comes from this human animality.

The parents have naturally a particular formation, they have a particular kind of good or bad health; at the very best, they have a lot of atavistic tendencies, habits, subconscious and even conscious complexes, deriving from their own birth, their environment and the life they led. And even if they are remarkable people, in their own way, usually they carry a quantity of things that are contrary to the true psychic life, I mean, even if they are the very best, the most conscious. And when the parents have done their utmost to give their children the best education, the children come in contact with all kinds of other people who have a great influence upon them especially when they are very young; these influences enter into the subconscious and they have to be fought against later on.

So I say, because of the way in which the body is brought into being at present, you have to face innumerable difficulties, corning more or less from the subconscient, that rise to the surface with which you have to fight if you want to be free entirely and develop normally.

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Regarding the Body

The fatigue of the body comes from an inner disharmony. There may be many other apparent reasons, but all amount to that fundamental circumstance viz. a want of balance among the different parts of the being. That may occur on a day when, for example, you had a lot of energy and you spent too much. But such is usually not the case with children. They spend and continue to spend till they are not able to. A child is very active till the last moment when it drops dead asleep. A minute before it was moving about, running, shouting, all on a sudden it falls down into deep sleep. And that is how they grow and gain strength. So the trouble does not lie in spending. Spending is easily repaired by necessary rest. Fatigue and lethargy too come from a different source.

People think they have only to continue to do what they do every day, perform the same work, with the same state of consciousness regularly and everything will be all right. But things do not happen that way. All on a sudden in the midst of the regular movement, you do not know why or how, a part of your being— some feeling, or thought—makes a progress, discovers a new thing, receives a light or a higher impulsion.

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That part shoots out, as it were, and goes forward: the other parts remain behind. That brings about a disharmony and it is quite sufficient to cause fatigue, even much fatigue. Truly, however, this is not fatigue, but a desire to keep quiet, to concentrate, to remain within oneself and build a new harmony between the disparate parts. And such a state or period is quite necessary which is a period of assimilation of what one has learnt, of harmonisation of all the limbs.

With regard to their physical being, men live in a formidable ignorance. How many of you know the exact quantity of food and the kind of food the body requires? Yes, simply this, how much to take and when to take? You do not know. You are taught all kinds of things. You learn why and how this earth moves or the sun does not, why or how the triangle consists of two right angles: your faculties of imagination and discrimination are set to the task and get sharpened. But this little bit of exact knowledge you do not have —the quantity of food you must take and the hour when the body needs it. It may be you are not unaware at times of this exact need. But to know properly demands a discipline, continuous labour for years perhaps. Years indeed you require when it is a matter of control over your mind, of attaining a consciousness subtle enough to enable you to come in contact with the elements of transformation and progress, to know how to dose for your body the exact amount of physical effort, material activity, expenditure and reception of energy, how to

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secure the proportion between what is received and what is given out, how to utilise energy to reestablish equilibrium that was broken in order to push forward new cells that were lagging behind and then how to build up conditions for a further step in upward progress to be possible etc., etc. The task is formidable. And yet that is the thing to be done if you want the body to be transformed. First of all, you must bring the body into complete harmony with the inner consciousness. That means a work in each cell of the body, in each small activity, in each movement of the organs. Only that and nothing more can keep you busy day and night with no other thing to look to. It is not easy to maintain the effort, the concentration, the inner vision in a continued manner.

You have to enter into the disposition of the cells, your inner physical organisation if the body is to answer to the force that descends. First of all, you must be conscious of your physical cells, you must know their different functions, the degree of receptivity in each, which of them are in good condition and which are not. Even the simple thing you do not know whether you are tired or not, not to speak of why you are tired. You do not know if you have a pain somewhere, and why it is there. It is exactly for this reason that you run to the doctor. For you have the illusion that the doctor would know better to look into what is there inside your body and what is happening there. That does not seem to be quite rational, but there is the habit. Who can look into oneself so precisely, accurately, positively as to know exactly what

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is out of order, why it is out of order, how it has come to be so? all that is a matter of pure observation. And then only arises the problem of doing the thing that will bring about a new order which is a much more difficult business. And yet this is only the a, b, c of body-transformation.

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Sadhana must be done in the Body

There are people who are disgusted with life. They want to go away in the hope that it will be better the next time. But we tell you: It is no use running away from your body, it will not be easier without a body. On the contrary, it will be much more difficult. The body is meant for you to do Yoga. We are upon earth here and it is precisely during the period of our life upon earth that we can make progress.

You cannot progress outside the life on earth. The terrestrial life, the material life is essentially the life for progress. It is here that we develop and advance. Outside the earthly life you take rest, otherwise you remain unconscious. You can have this period of assimilation, period of rest or period of inconscience elsewhere. But for periods of progress you must come to the earth and in the body.

So when you take a body it is for making progress and when you leave it the period of progress ends. Now true progress means Sadhana, in other words the most conscious and the most rapid progress. Otherwise there is a progress with the march of Nature and that takes centuries and centuries, hundreds of centuries to move just a little forward.

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True progress is done by Sadhana. By Yoga you can do a thing in a brief space that would otherwise take a long, interminable period. But it is always upon earth and with the body that this can be done, not elsewhere. So that is why while you are in the body you must profit by it, not to lose time, not to say, 'later on, later on'. It is much better to do the thing forthwith. Years that you pass without making progress are years wasted, you can only regret for it afterwards.

* *

Every human being here upon earth, whoever he is and whatever he is, has within him a psychic being, only in various degrees of evolution. An embodied person possesses many other things e.g. states and forms of consciousness. His task upon earth is to transform these elements which form as it were, the part of universe given to him for his work of transformation. And even if he has a vaster mission beyond his own person, he cannot do that unless he has done the personal work first. You cannot change the outside world unless you have begun changing your own self. It is the first and indispensable condition and it is true for all, young or old, small or big. It is for this reason that life has been given to the psychic being: it is man's opportunity for progress. The span of earthly life is the time for progress. Outside earthly life there is no progress. The possibility and the means for the progress are only there in earthly life.

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So one must begin with oneself. When the work has been done with regard to oneself then only one can begin elsewhere. But first, work at home.

You go to kill yourself when you are a coward. The psychic comes with a definite aim to gather a certain sum of experiences, to learn, to make progress. If you go away before the work is done, you have to come back and do it over again but in circumstances much more difficult than before. Whatever you avoided in one life, you will find reappearing in a more difficult form. Without going very far, take for example this small difficulty in your life, the examination you have to pass. If you do not go through it, if you turn your back, you will have to pass it another time and that time it will be more difficult.

Men are so ignorant. They think that there is life and that there is death, life is a bundle of troubles, death brings about peace. But it is not at all like that. Generally when one goes out unnaturally, in a fit of ignorant and obscure passion, one enters straight into a vital world, made of all these passions and ignorant movements. The trouble they want to avoid they meet again but without having the protection that the body gives them. For if ever you had a nightmare i.e. a bold promenade into the vital world, you know that you come out of it by waking up, in other words, by rushing into your body. But when you have wilfully destroyed the body, you have lost your protective armour. You have to live in a continual nightmare. It is not very pleasant.

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To avoid a nightmare you have to be in your psychic consciousness; for when you are in that consciousness nothing troubles you or brings you anxiety. It is only when you are in a movement of ignorance that you do not have the courage or the strength to face a danger.

What is the source of cowardice?

Ignorance is the source. Ignorance is the cause of all evil. I think, however, that one becomes a coward when one is tamasic i.e. one fears to make an effort.

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On Food

I believe the primitive man was very near to the animal. He lived more by instinct than by intelligence. He ate when he was hungry without any kind of fixed rule. He might have had his own tastes and preferences, we do not know much about it; but we know that he lived much more physically, much less mentally or even vitally as now.

Originally very material in nature, much like the animal, man in the course of his progress through centuries or millenniums became more and more mental, more and more vital. And as he grew more mental and more vital, refinement became possible, the intelligence increased, but the possibility too of perversion and deformation. It is one thing to educate the senses so as to bring into them every variety of refinement, growth, knowledge, appreciation, taste and all that, meaning a progress in consciousness: it is quite another to be attached to the object of your sense, to have greed, to be a glutton.

You can make a very thorough study of taste, for example: you can acquire a detailed knowledge of the different tastes of different things, the association of idea or notion with taste, which means not perhaps a

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progress in the vital, but at least a development of this particular sense. That is permissible but there is a great difference between that and eating out of greed, thinking of food all the while, eating not because of its need but because of desire and gluttony.

Indeed, people who try to develop their taste are rarely very much attached to food. They cultivate their taste for developing, refining their senses, not for the sake of eating. In the same way the artist, a painter for example, trains his eyes so that he can know how to appraise the beauty of form and colour, line and design, composition and harmony that is found in physical nature. It is not mere desire or hunger that drives them, it is taste, culture, development of the sense of sight, appreciation of beauty that is his preoccupation. Generally, artists who are truly artists, who love and live their art, who are in search of beauty are people who have not many desires. They live in their aesthetic sensibility, in their senses turned to the enjoyment and creation of beauty. They are not of the kind of people who live by their vital impulses and physical desires.

In a general way, education, culture, refinement of the senses are the means of curing movements of crude instinct and desire and passion. To obliterate them is not curing them; instead, they have to be cultivated, intellectualised, refined. That is the surest way of curing them. To give them their maximum growth in view of the progress and development of consciousness, so that one may attain to a sense of harmony and exactitude

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of perception is part of culture and education for the human being. Men cultivate their intelligence in the same way: they read, they think, compare and contrast, they make a study. In this way their mind enlarges, it becomes wider and more comprehensive than the mind of those who live without a mental education, who possess only a few ideas that perhaps even contradict each other. They are moved wholly by these as they have no other, they think those are the only ideas that should govern them: such minds are extremely narrow and limited. On the other hand, they who have cultivated their intelligence, who have studied and thought, who have widened their mental range a little and so can see and note and compare other ideas and possible notions discover easily that it is sheer ignorance and absurdity to be attached to a limited set of ideas and to consider that alone as the expression of truth.

This training of taste, this education of the senses is a very good, a necessary means to prepare the consciousness for a higher development. There are persons who are very crude and very simple in nature. They can have a strong inspiration and arrive at a certain spiritual growth but the foundation will always remain of a somewhat inferior quality: and when they come back to their ordinary consciousness they find there great obstacles: for the stuff is missing there, there are not, in the vital and physical consciousness, elements enough to enable it to support a descent of the higher force.

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How does fasting bring a state of receptivity ?

Usually the vital being is concentrated very much in the body. And when the body is well fed, it takes its force and energy through the food—it is one way of absorbing energy, almost the only way, at least the more important way, under the existing conditions of life, but it is a tamasic way.

This energy that one takes in, if you reflect upon the matter you will easily admit, is the vital energy that is in the plant or the animal and logically it is of an inferior quality to that which should be man's who is supposed to be on a higher level in the scale of species. So it is impossible to eat without absorbing a large quantity of unconsciousness. Inevitably that makes you heavy and dense. And if you are in the habit of eating much, a good part of your consciousness is engaged in digesting and assimilating what you eat. Thus if you do not take food, that already frees you from this unconsciousness that you have no longer to assimilate and transform within you: that liberates energy in you. Then, as there is an instinct in the being to make up for energy spent, if you do not gather it from food i.e. from below, you make automatically an effort to draw it from the universal vital energy which is free around you. And if you can assimilate that energy, assimilate it directly, then there is no limit to your energy.

It is not like your stomach which can digest only a limited quantity of food and this food again can give

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out only a portion—a very small portion—of its energy. For after the energy spent in swallowing, masticating, digesting etc. how much of it still remains available? If, on the other hand, you learn—you learn instinctively, it is a kind of instinct—to draw from the universal energy which is freely available in the world and in any quantity, you can take it in and absorb as much as you are capable of it. Thus, as I have said, when there is not the support from below coming from food, the body makes an automatic movement to get the wanted energy from the environment. It gets at times, more than enough, even an overdose and that puts you in a state of tension or stimulation. And if your body is strong and can remain without food for some time, then you can maintain your poise and utilise the energies in all ways—to make inner progress, for example, to become more conscious, to change your nature. But if your body has not much reserve, it gets easily weakened by fast, then there occurs a disharmony between the intensity of the energies you absorb and the capacity of the body to hold them and that upsets you. You lose your poise, the equilibrium of the forces is broken and anything can happen. In any case, if such a thing happens, you lose a good deal of self-control, you get excited and this unnatural excitement you consider as a higher state of consciousness. But it is an inner unbalance, nothing more. Otherwise, in that state your senses get refined and receptive. Thus when you fast and do not draw energy from below, if you smell a flower, you feel nourished, the perfume you

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breathe in serves as food, it gives you energy and this you would not have known but for the fasting.

In this condition certain faculties become intensified and that is taken as a spiritual effect. But in reality it has very little to do with spirituality. However, instead of thinking all the while about food, how to get it and eat, if one were to take to fasting for the sake of freeing oneself from the bondage of food preoccupation, rising a little in the scale of consciousness, it would be a good thing. If you have the faith it will do you good, it will purify you, make you progress a little. In that way it is all right: it will not do any harm to our body excepting making it a little thinner. But if you fast and then continuously turn back to it and think of the food that you might have eaten or are likely to eat after the fasting, well, such fasting is worse than feasting.

Materlinck,—you must have heard of him, the author of BLUE BIRD—was a very corpulent person. As he had some sense of beauty he disliked corpulency, and in order to reduce it or keep it within bounds, he took to fasting for one day a week regularly. As he was an intelligent man, he did not on that day give any thought to food, but he kept himself wholly engaged in writing and studying. Fasting was of use to him.

The moral then is this: you must not think about food: you should regulate your life in such an automatic manner that you have not got to think about it. Eat at fixed hours, reasonably—calmly, quietiy, composedly. Do not eat too much; for then you will have to concern

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yourself with digestion: that would be a disagreeable thing; it will make you lose time. Eat just what is necessary. You must give up all desire and attraction, all vital movement. When you eat only because the body needs food, then the body will tell you in a very precise and exact manner when it has just the amount necessary. It is only when you have notions in your mind or desires in your vital, when for example, you are in love with a particular item, that you eat in multiples of the quantity needed and oppress your body and make it lose its natural perception.

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Meat-Eating

What happens when one eats meat?

I will tell you then a story. I knew a young woman, a Swedish, who was doing Sadhana. Normally she was a vegetarian, by habit as well as by inclination. One day she was invited to a dinner. She was given fowl to eat. She did not like to make a fuss and quietly ate her fowl. Now at night she found herself, in dream of course, in a basket and her head in between two bits of sticks and being shaken, shaken to and fro. She felt very unhappy, very miserable. And then she saw herself head down and legs up in the air and being shaken, shaken continually. She was thoroughly miserable. All on a sudden she felt she was being skinned, peeled and how painful it all was! And then some one came with a knife and cut off her head. She woke up at that. She told me the story and said she never had such a frightful nightmare in her life. She had thought nothing of this kind before going to bed; it must have been simply the consciousness of the poor chicken that entered into her and she experienced in dream all the agonies of this creature when it was being carried to the market, her feathers pulled out and in the end the head severed. That is what happens. In other words, along with the

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meal that you take, you absorb also, in a large or small measure, the consciousness of the animal whose flesh you swallow. Of course it is nothing serious, but it is not always pleasant. Yet obviously it does not help you to be more on the side of man than on that of the animal kind. Primitive men, we know, were much nearer the animal level and used to take raw meat: that gave them evidently more strength and energy than cooked meat. They used to kill an animal, tear it to pieces and bite into the flesh. That is how they were robust and forceful. Also it was for this reason perhaps that there was in their intestines an organ called appendix in a much bigger size than it is now: for it had to digest raw meat. As men however started cooking their food and found it more tasty that way, the organ too gradually diminished in size and fell into atrophy; now it does not serve any purpose, it is an encumbrance and often a source of illness. This means that it is time to change the diet and take to something less bestial. It depends, however, on the state of the consciousness of each person. An ordinary man, who leads an ordinary life, has ordinary aspirations, thinks of nothing else than earning his livelihood, keeping good health and rearing a family, need not pick and choose, except on purely hygienic grounds. He may eat meat or anything else that he considers helpful and useful, doing good to him.

But if you wish to move from the ordinary life to a higher life, the problem acquires an interest. And again, for a higher life if you wish to move up still farther and

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prepare yourself for transformation, then the problem, becomes very important. For there are certain foods that help the body to become more refined and others that keep it down to the level of animalhood. But it is only then that the question acquires an importance, not before. Before you come to that point, you have a lot of other things to do. It is certainly better to purify your mind, purify your vital before you think of purifying your body. For even if you take all possible precautions and live physically with every care to eat only the things that help to refine the body, but the mind and the vital remain full of desire and inconscience and obscurity and all the rest, your care will serve no purpose. Your body will become perhaps weak, disharmonious with your inner life and drop off one day.

You must begin from within. I have said a hundred times, you must begin from above. You must purify first the higher region and then purify the lower. I da not mean by this that you should give yourself up to all the licences that degrade the body. I do not mean that at all. I am not advising you not to control your desires. What I mean is this: do not try to be an angel in the body before you are already something of the kind in your mind and in your vital. For that will bring about a dislocation, a lack of balance. And I have always said that to maintain the balance, all the parts must progress together. In trying to bring light into one part you must not leave another part in darkness. You must not leave any obscure corner anywhere.

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Faith and Progress

When one makes an effort, makes a little progress, one gets satisfied and is proud of it. That spoils everything. How to get rid of this fault ?

It is because one looks at oneself while doing a thing. It is the habit of constantly observing oneself as one works or lives. Certainly you must observe yourself; but more than that you must be sincere and spontaneous —spontaneous in what you do and not turning towards yourself all the while, judging, criticising, sometimes even severely. That is often as bad as patting oneself with satisfaction.

You must be sincere in your aspiration, you need not even know that you are aspiring: you should become the aspiration. When you can do that, you feel an extraordinary strength. One minute of such an experience prepares you for years of progress. When you are no longer a person, an ego that is always looking at itself, when you are the very action you do—especially in the act of aspiration—well, I say nothing can be better than that. When it is not a person that aspires, when the aspiration shoots up in a concentrated momentum, one can go very far. Otherwise there is a mixture of vanity, self-sufficiency, even self-pity, all kinds of petty movements which spoil the affair.

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What are the conditions for a descent of faith ?

The most important condition is trust, a childlike trust, the candid feeling that knows that needed things will come, that there is no question about it. When the child has need of anything, he is certain that it is coming. This kind of simple trust or reliance is the most important condition.

One must aspire, it is indispensable; but there are people who aspire yet with so much conflict within them, between faith and want of faith, trust and distrust, between optimism that is sure of victory and pessimism that is just waiting for the catastrophe to come etc., etc. If such is the state of your being, you may aspire but nothing will come out of it. You say, "I aspire and I get nothing"; that is because you are demolishing your aspiration all the while by your want of trust. But if truly you have the trust, things would be different. Children, for example, when they are left to themselves, when they have not been deformed by elderly people, have a great confidence that everything will be all right. When they have an accident, they never think that it will be anything serious. They have the spontaneous conviction that it will be set right soon and that helps things to get right soon. When you aspire for the Force, ask for the Divine's help, if you do it with an unshakable certitude that the thing will come, in that case, it is impossible for it not to come. In fact, as I say, such a conviction is in itself an inner opening. There are people

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who are naturally and automatically in this condition. Whenever or wherever there occurs an opportunity to receive something from above they are there present. And there are others who always fail to be on the spot when there is an occasion for the descent: they close themselves at the right moment. But they who have the childlike reliance, they never miss an opportunity. It is a very curious phenomenon. Apparently there may not be much difference between the two types. Both may have the same goodwill, the same aspiration, the same desire to do one's best, but he who has a happy confidence in him, who does not question, who does not ask if he will have the thing or not, whether the Divine will answer or not—for, to him that is not the question, it is understood and taken for granted: "The thing I need I shall be given", he says, "if I pray my prayer will be granted, if I am in difficulty and I ask for help, the help will come, it will not only come but settle everything"—I say, the person who has such a spontaneous, candid, unquestioning reliance gets the best conditions under which an effective descent can occur; its action then is marvellous.

It is with your mental contradictions and doubts that you spoil everything, with this kind of ideas that enter into you when you are in difficulty: "It is impossible, I shall never come to the end of it, suppose the situation gets worse, suppose I am to roll down etc., etc...." In this way you build up a wall between you and the Force that you want to receive.

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The psychic being has this trust, has it in a wonderful manner, without a shadow, without a question, without contradictions and when it is there, there is no prayer that remains unanswered, no aspiration unfulfilled.

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Value of Religious Exercises

What is the value of religious exercises (such as fapa etc.)?

These things, if they help you, are all right; if they do not, naturally they are of no use. The value is quite relative. It is worth only the effect it has on you or the measure of your belief in it. If it is an aid to your concentration, then, as I say, it is welcome. The ordinary consciousness takes to the thing through a kind of superstition; one thinks, "if I go to the temple or to the church once a week, for example, if I say my prayers regularly, something good will happen to me". It is a superstition spread all over the world, but it has no spiritual value.

I have been to holy places. I have seen monuments considered as very highly religious, in France, in Japan and elsewhere; they were not always the same kind of temples or churches nor were they the same gods but the impression they left on me, my experiences of them were everywhere almost the same, with but slight differences. There is usually a force concentrated at the place, but its character depends entirely upon the faith of the faithful; also there is a difference between the

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force as it really exists and the form in which it appears to the faithful. For instance, in a most famous and most beautiful place of worship which was, from the standpoint of art, a most magnificent creation one could imagine, I saw within its holy of holies—a huge black Spider that had spread its net all around, caught within it and absorbed all the energies emanating from the devotion of the people, their prayers and all that. It was not a very pleasant spectacle. But the people who were there and prayed felt the divine contact, they received all kinds of benefit from their prayers. And yet the truth of the matter was what I saw. The people had the faith and their faith changed what was bad into something that was good to them. Now if I had gone and told them: 'you think it is God you are praying to! it is only a formidable vital Spider that is sucking your force.' Surely it would not have been very charitable on my part. But everywhere it is almost the same thing. There is a vital Force presiding. And vital beings feed upon the vibrations of human emotion. Very few are they, a microscopic number, who go to the temples and churches and holy places with the true religious feeling, that is to say, not to pray or beg something of God, but to offer themselves, to express gratitude, to aspire, to surrender. One in a million would be too many. These when they are there, get some touch of the Divine just for the moment. But all others go only out of superstition, egoism, self-interest and create the atmosphere as it is found and it is that that you usually breathe in when you

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go to a holy place; only as you go there with a good feeling, you say to yourself "what a peace-giving spot!"

I regret to say it. But it is like that. I tell you I have purposely made the experiment a little everywhere. Perhaps I came across at times in far-away small corners—like a small village church, for example—places where there was real peace and quiet and some true aspiration. Barring that, everywhere it is but a web of adverse vital forces that use everything for their food. The bigger the congregation, the more portentous the vital deity. Besides, in the invisible world it is only the vital beings that like to be worshipped. For, as I have said, that pleases them, gives them importance. They are puffed up with pride and are happy; when they can have a troop of people adoring them, they reach the very height of satisfaction.

But if you take a truly divine being, that is not the thing he likes or appreciates. He does not like to be worshipped; worship does not give him special pleasure. But if he sees anywhere a fine intuitive sense, a good feeling, a movement of unselfishness or spiritual enthusiasm, he considers that as infinitely more valuable than prayers and Pujas. I tell you seriously, if you place a true god upon a chair and compel him to remain there all the time you are doing him Puja, he can amuse himself by letting you do, but surely it gives him no happiness, none! He feels neither flattered nor satisfied nor glorified by your Puja. You must get that idea out of your head. There is an entire region between the spiritual world and the material, belonging to the vital beings and

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it is this region that is full of such things as are liked by them, because they are their food. They are happy, they feel important when men call them, pray to them, make their offerings to them: the being that has the largest number of adorers is the most satisfied, the most glorified, the most puffed up. How can you imagine that a true god, a god even of the Overmind—although those of this region are already somewhat touched by human frailties—that is to say, one who has the higher consciousness, would get any pleasure out of these things? I repeat, an act of real kindness, intelligence, unselfishness or fine understanding or sincere aspiration is for him an altogether higher and more valuable thing than any petty religious ceremony. There is no comparison. You speak of religious ceremonies. There is, for example, a being called Kali; there are many Kalis, of many varieties, installed in temples and houses. All of them almost are vital beings and forces, some are ugly and terrible. I have known people who had such a fear of Kali—their household Kali—that they trembled at the thought of offending her in any way, of committing the least fault that would displease her; for that means Kali's vengeance. I know, I know very well these entities: they are beings of the vital world, they are vital formations—the forms are given by the human mind and what forms! To think that men worship such terrible and demoniac things!

From this standpoint it is good that for a time humanity should come out of the religious atmosphere, full of fear

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III

and blind superstitious submission by which the adverse forces have profited so monstrously. The age of negation, of atheism and positivism is from this view quite indispensable for man's liberation from sheer ignorance. It is only when you have come out of this, this abject submission to the evil forces of the Vital that you can rise to truly spiritual heights and then become there collaborators and right instruments for the forces of the Truth and Consciousness and Power. The superstitions of the lower levels you must leave far behind to rise high.

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Prayer and Aspiration

(I)

What you do has an inevitable and absolute consequence. This is a necessary concept at a given moment of the evolutionary process. It is meant to prevent men from becoming completely egoistic or doing what they do in a totally unconscious manner. There are many who are like that, the majority, I suppose; they follow their impulses and do not ask what consequences their actions will have for themselves and for others. It is good then if someone told them with a severe air: "Take care, that has consequences which last long, very long". There are religions that rose to warn you: "You will pay for that in another life", "If you commit this sin, you will go into hell for eternity" and so on. That is, however, a most fantastic story that man has invented; still, people are frightened and checked in someway. It spares them a moment for reflection before they run after their impulses, not always, sometimes the reflection comes after, a little late.

In all religions people who declared that the consequences of Karma are rigorous and who gave these absolute rules, must have done so, I believe, to put themselves in place of Nature, to pull the strings that move ordinary men. For these rules are mental construetions,

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more or less sincere perhaps, cutting things into bits and telling you: "Do this, do that; it is not this, it is that." People are confused, frightened, they do not know what to do at the end.

What they must do is to get to an upper floor. And they must be given the key to open the door. The key is (1) a sufficiently sincere aspiration, or (2) a sufficiently intense prayer. I said or, but it may not be so; there are people who like the one and there are people who prefer the other. But in both there is magic power and one must know to use them.

There are some who detest prayers. If they entered deep into their heart, they would see that it is pride, even worse than that, vanity. There are people who have no aspiration, they try but they are not able. They are not able, because they have not the flame of the will, nor have they the flame of humility. Both are necessary. To change one's Karma one needs a great humility and a great will-power.

The Divine Grace counteracts the Karma wholly; the Grace melts Karma, as the sun melts butter. If you have an aspiration sincere enough, or, a prayer intense enough you can bring down into you something that will change everything.

(2)

I have already spoken to you of the different planes of consciousness. On the purely material plane (separating

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it from the vital), it is all absolutely mechanistic: there things follow each in a rigid chain of cause and effect. If you want to find the cause of a thing, you will have to find the cause of the cause; and if you want to find the effect of a thing you will have to find also the effect of the effect. The causes and effects linked together form a closed ring. Only, into this purely material plane there can intervene and does intervene the vital plane, as for example in the vegetable kingdom.

The vital plane has a totally different determinism, which is its own. And when you bring the vital determinism into physical determinism, that makes a combination which changes everything.

Above the vital plane lies the mental plane. The mental plane too has its own determinism in which all mental things are chained together in a rigorous sequence.

Each of these planes has what may be called a horizontal determinism.

But, as I say, there is also a vertical movement. That is, the mental descends into the vital and the vital descends into the physical. Thus there are three determinisms which intervene and produce something that is quite different.

Where the mind intervenes the determinism will necessarily be different from the determinism where it does not intervene. In the higher animal life there is already an intervening mental determinism which is quite different from the determinism on the vegetal plane. Above these planes there are others up to the highest.

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The highest plane is the plane of absolute freedom.

If you are capable of traversing all these planes in your consciousness, so to say, in a vertical line and reach the highest and then, through this joining up, if you are able to bring down this determinism of perfect freedom into the material determinism, then you change everything. And all the intermediaries also will undergo the change. Because of these changes it will all look like total freedom. For the intervention or the descent of one plane upon another will have unforeseen consequences for the lower one. The higher planes may foresee, but the lower ones cannot. Being unforeseen, things and events have then an air of the absolutely free and the totally unexpected.

It is only when you live consciously and constantly on the highest level, that is to say, the level of the supreme consciousness, that you are able to see that everything is absolutely determined, but at the same time by the very complexity of the intermixture of these determinisms everything is absolutely free. You may call this phenomenon as you like, but it is a kind of absolute determinism and absolute freedom combined. It is the level where there are no contradictions, where all things exist and exist in harmony without contradicting each other.

(3)

Everything is possible. It is a gradual unfolding along a highway, as it were, which is unknown and unknowable

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to you. In the universe all will be unfolded. But in what order and in what way? Everything is there absolutely, eternally but static. Everything is going to come out into the material world, naturally, more or less one after another. What course will the unfolding follow?

Up there, it is the domain of absolute freedom. Who tells you that a sufficiently sincere aspiration, a sufficiently intense prayer cannot change the course of the unfolding? It means everything is possible. This is one wonderful grace that has been granted to human nature. Only one does not know how to make use of it.

So, in spite of the most absolute determinism in the horizontal line, one can, if one is able to cross it and reach the highest point of consciousness, change what appears to be absolutely determined.

All theories are mere theories, that is to say, mental conceptions which are only representations or images of the reality, they are not the reality at all. When you say "determinism" or "liberty", you say only words. All that is very incomplete, very feeble description of That which Is, in truth, within you, around you, everywhere. And if you are even to begin to understand what the universe is like, you must come out of these mental formulas; otherwise you will never understand.

Indeed, if you live just for a minute only by this absolutely sincere aspiration, this adequately intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for long hours.

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Meditation and Wakefulness

To have good meditation or contact with the inner world, if you are obliged to go into Samadhi, then your normal consciousness will remain always the same without changing. In other words, people who have a higher consciousness only in deep meditation, once they come out of it, are not worth more than what they were before. All their defects are there which they get back as soon as they get back their previous consciousness.¹Such people never progress; for they never establish a connection between their deeper consciousness, the truth of their being, and their external being. They take off their external being like a robe and put it aside in a corner telling it "keep quiet, my dear friend, you bother me"—and they enter into contemplation, meditation, their deep experience or realisation; and when they return they put on their robe again which has not changed in the meanwhile, even might have become more dirty

¹ Sri Ramakrishna used to tell a story in this connection. When asked about the purificatory virtue of a dip in the Holy Ganges he answered that the sins leave you as soon as you are about to enter the waters, but they keep waiting on the shore, and directly you are out they pounce upon you and settle in you as merrily as before.

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than ever. So they remain where they are or become worse, in their outward nature, in spite of their meditation. If you want to change your external being, you must remain conscious of it and while being conscious have other experiences: you must not lose contact with it if you wish to derive full benefit out of your experiences.

There are many such people who meditate for long hours, some almost all the time; but if by chance they are disturbed in their meditation by someone calling them or making noise, they fly into a rage, shout and abuse the whole world; they become more nasty than they would have been had they remained ordinary men without trying meditation. The reason is, as I say, that they neglect to associate their outer life with their deeper consciousness: they cut themselves into two, there is one bit that is within making progress and another bit outside that goes from bad to worse, for it is left wholly uncared for.

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Dealing with a Wrong Movement

There is a great difference between pushing a thing away simply because you do not want it and changing the state of the consciousness so that the thing you do not want becomes completely foreign to your nature. Usually when you have a movement in you which you do not like you drive it back and repel, but you do not take the trouble of finding in yourself that which served and serves still as a support to the movement, the particular tendency, the turn of consciousness which enables the thing to enter into the consciousness. If, however, instead of a gesture of mere condemnation and suppression, you enter deep into your vital consciousness and find out the support, that is to say, the small vibration of a special kind embedded far in a corner, often a corner so dark that it is difficult to see it is there, if, in spite of all difficulty, you concentrate and follow on the track of the thing, the origin of the movement, then at the end you discover quite a small snake-like thing, coiled up, quite small, not bigger than a pea, but very black and embedded firmly. There are then two procedures: either to throw a light so intense, the light of the truth-consciousness, so strong upon the point that the thing is dissolved or to seize the little object as with a pair of

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pincers, pull it out and place it before your consciousness. The first method is radical, but you have not always at your disposal the light of the Truth and you cannot make use of it whenever you like. So you have to take to the second method. You may follow it, but it will give you pain, a pain as great as when a tooth is being pulled out. I do not know if any of you had the ex-perince, but it is painful. Usually, however, what you do in the presence of an undesirable movement is to try to wipe it away—gently, I suppose—or cover it up; thus things continue as before. You do not have the courage and so things do not change. Yes, it gives you pain; the pain is usually here in the heart. But if you have the courage, it is better to pull out the thing than to temporize with it; pull it out and put it in front of your gaze; it dissolves. That makes an end of it and you are cured. The thing will not come into you any more to trouble you. But the operation is radical and it has to be done as an operation.

In the beginning you need a great perseverance in seeking out the thing. For normally when you are in search of these things, the mind comes in and deploys a thousand and one reasons and favourable explanations so that you may not pursue the enquiry. It tells you: "no, it is not your fault at all; it is the circumstances, it is the people, it is things coming from outside, it is this and it is that," all excellent excuses, and if you are not firm in your resolution, you let things go on and you are where you were; the thing will come back to trouble

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you again and you have to begin all over once more. But if you have done the operation, everything is done with. Do not trust the mind and its explanations. It might inspire you to say: "yes, yes, on other occasions it was like that, I admit, I was indeed in the wrong; but this time, I am sure, it is not my fault etc., etc.". If you do not deal firmly with your adversary, it will be always there, hiding in the subconscient, lodged there comfortably, coming up any day you are off your guard. I have seen people cherishing the evil in this way for more than thirty-five years. And if one does not go about it in the right way, there is no reason why the things should not continue life after life. The only safe way then is to do the operation, cost what it may. For it gives you the final relief. I say, when you throw the spot of light upon the place, it burns, it seres. But you must bear it. You must have the sincerity that does not allow you to draw back, to cover up the place and retire. You must instead throw it wide open, receive the blow straight upon you.

I have told you to seek out the place where the hidden thing lies. The black thing has many a cosy corner in your being. There are people who have it in the head, some in the heart, others down below; but wherever it is when you track it down it has the same look, the little black creature rolled up, not bigger than a pea but hard and firmly set, a microbe-size snake coiled up. If it is something in the head it becomes somewhat difficult to discover. For the head is full of wrong ideas and it

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is not easy to put it into order for pursuing the right track. A comparatively easier place to discover and to cure is in the heart, though here it gives the greatest pain. But here it is found more easily and cured also most radically. Down below in the vital things are very confused and obscure. All things are mixed up in a veritable chaos. The movements are also more violent, more uncontrollable and ignorant. Here are all the movements of anger, pride, ambition, passion, all attachments and sentimentalities, the hunger that you call love. And there are a hundred others. There are as many kinds in the head too. There it is the perversions of thought, all the betrayals, the betrayals of your soul. It is inconceivable how one betrays one's soul, in how many ways, how persistently, the decisions, the points of view, the favourable explanations which your brain supplies to buttress you against your perception that you have done something wrong. You have to disentangle all this, put each thing in its place, throw upon each the light of your true consciousness and judge—burn, purify or transform.

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Personal Effort and Surrender

There is no difference in the end between the two if the goal to attain is the Impersonal Divine, that is to say, if you want to unite and identify yourself with the Impersonal Divine, merge into it. But if your aspiration is to reach what is beyond, what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental Reality, then there comes in a difference, a difference in the goal as well as in the way. For the way to the supramental realisation is essentially the way of surrender. It is a question of temperament perhaps. And if one has the temperament, the disposition, the path of surrender is infinitely more easy: three-fourths of your trouble and difficulty are got rid of automatically. But it may prove hard going for some.

Now as regards the result, in one case, I may say, it is linear, it ends at a point, as it were; in the other case, the path is spherical and ends in a totality. Each one individually can reach his origin and the optimum of his being; the origin and the optimum of one's being is the same as the Eternal, the Infinite, the Supreme. If you reach your origin, you reach the Supreme, but you reach along a single line—do not take the image literally, it is only a description to make the thing easy to understand. So it is, I say, a linear realisation terminating

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at a point and this point is one with the Supreme, your maximum possibility. By the other way, you arrive at, what I call, a spherical realisation; for it gives you the idea of something that contains all, it is not a point but a totality that excludes nothing.

The relation of the whole and its part does not hold good here; for there is no longer any division. The very quality of the approach is different. Can you say that a perfect identification with one drop of water would give you the knowledge of what the sea is? And here the perfect identification in question is not merely with the ocean but with all possible oceans. And yet the perfect identification with one drop of water does give you the knowledge of the ocean in its essence; but in the other way you know the ocean not merely in its essence but in its totality. It is however very difficult to express the reality of the truth. What can be said to put it as clearly as possible is this: in the line of personal effort, when one depends solely upon one's personal strength, all that has been individualised maintains the virtues of individuality and hence also, in a certain sense, all the limitations necessary for this individuality. In the other case, when you have surrendered your individuality, you not only enjoy the virtues of individuality but also you are not subject to its limitations. It is almost high philosophy, I am afraid. It is not clear therefore. But that is all I can say.

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The Surrender of an Inner Warrior

It means the the vital when it is converted. The converted vital is for the Divine like a warrior. The vital in man is the region of power and it is that which drives him to fight, to fight and conquer. It is the most difficult element to deal with: for it is this capacity to fight that also produces in the vital the spirit of revolt and independence, the will to follow its own will. But when the vital understands and is converted, if it is truly surrendered to the Divine Will, then its fighting capacity turns against anti-divine forces, the forces of obscurity that prevent the transformation: the powers of the vital are strong enough to conquer the enemies. The antidivine forces are in the vital world: from there they spread upon the physical. But their own seat is in the vital and it is the converted vital that can effectively deal with them. But the conversion is difficult.

The higher vital finds it much less difficult to surrender, for it is under the influence of the mind and sometimes even of the psychic; it understands them more easily. It is less difficult than the lower vital, for the latter is essentially the stronghold of desires and blind impulsions. The lower vital, even when it surrenders, when it does what it is asked to do, is not wholly happy, it suffers

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and only pushes down the impulse to revolt, it obeys unwillingly and does not collaborate. Unless it collaborates in joy and true love, nothing can be done, the transformation cannot come.

The surrender can be happy only when it is sincere. Or rather one can turn round the thing and say, if the vital is not happy, you must know for certain that it is not perfectly sincere. If it is not happy, that means there is some reservation, something that would like the thing to be otherwise, something with a will of its own, its own desire, its own aim and which is not satisfied, not completely surrendered, not sincere in its surrender. But if one is sincere in his surrender one is perfectly happy automatically: he enjoys an inexpressible happiness. Therefore if there is not this inexpressible happiness, it is a

Now if you wish to discover that part, you have to aspire, to insist, throw the light—pray, if need be. There are many other ways. Sometimes a surgical operation too is necessary, put the red hot iron into the wound, just as you have to do when there is a nasty abscess that does not want to burst.

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Opening to the Divine

You are to open yourself to the Divine and receive Him. Usually you open yourself in all directions to everything and everybody in the world. You open your surface being and receive there all influences from all quarters. So inside you there comes about what we can call a hotch-potch of all contrary and contradictory movements: and that creates difficulties without number. Now instead of that, live away from the surface, from the outside and open up to the Divine and receive nothing but the Divine force. If you can do that, all difficulties practically disappear. But, of course, the trouble is there. Unless one is alchemically conditioned, it is an impossibility to have relations with people, to talk to them, to deal with them, have interchanges with them and yet not absorb something out of them. If one can surround oneself with an atmosphere that acts as a filter, then all that come from outside are checked and sifted before they reach you or touch you. That needs a good training and a large experience. That is why people in ancient days who wanted an easier path took to solitude, into the depths of the forest, on the top of a hill or under a cave so that they might not have to do with people— for that naturally reduces undesirable interchange.

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Only, it has also been found that such people begin to take an enormous interest in the life of animals and plants instead of men: for it is indeed difficult to do without interchange with something or other. So the best thing would be to face the problem squarely, to clothe yourself with an atmosphere totally concentrated on the Divine so that whatever passes across is filtered in its passage. And further, there is the question of food. The body is obliged to take in foreign matter in order to subsist, it would therefore absorb at the same time a fair quantity of inert and unconscious forces or that of some not very desirable consciousness. I once spoke to you of the consciousness that one absorbs with food, there is also unconsciousness that one absorbs in the same way. That is why in many systems of Yoga you are advised to offer first to the Divine your food and then eat: it means calling down the Divine into your food before absorbing it. Offering means putting in contact: the food is put in contact with the Divine i.e. put under His influence. This is a very good, a very useful procedure; if you know how to do it, it would diminish very much the labour of the inner transformation that one has to do. For in the world we live in solidarity with all others. You cannot take in a single breath of air without absorbing the vibrations, the numberless vibrations that come from all kinds of movement and all kinds of people. So if you want to keep yourself intact, you must, as I have said, maintain yourself in the condition of a filter allowing nothing undesirable to enter. Or put on a mask as

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one does when crossing an infected and poisoned locality, or do something similar.

One must have around oneself an atmosphere so condensed, condensed in a spirit of total surrender, that nothing can enter without being automatically filtered. There are wicked thoughts, evil will about you, harmful formations sent out by bad people. The air pullulates with these: dark noisome bacilli. It is so troublesome to be always on the look out, at every step to be on one's guard, to move slowly with care and cautions and precautions; even then one is not sure. But if you cover yourself with the cloak of light, the light of a happy, sincere surrender, and aspiration, that is a wonderful filter, that gives you automatic protection. The undesirable forces not only cannot enter, they are thrown back upon their originator, the attackers themselves become their own victims.

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To Melt into the Divine

How to melt into the Divine? That is to say, how to get dissolved in the Divine, lose one's ego ?

First of all, one must wish for it, will for it, aspire for it with perseverence. Everytime the ego shows itself, you must give it a tap on the nose, until it receives so much of it that it gets tired and gives up. Generally, however, one does not administer the tap but cherishes the miscreant, justifies its presence. When it shows itself, one says, "After all it is right"; although in most cases, one does not even know it is the ego, one takes it for one's self. The first condition then is to consider it essential that one should have no more ego. You must understand what is meant when you say you no longer want it. It is not so easy. For while in your brain you turn and turn the idea 'I do not want ego, I do not want to separate from the Divine', in life it has no effect; when actually you do a selfish or egoistic act, you find it quite natural; it does not even give a shock to you.

We must begin by understanding what the thing really means. There are many stages or steps in it. First of all, you must distinguish between two things (1) selfishness and (2) egoism. Selfishness is a crude form and it should not be very difficult to get rid of it,

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at least a good part of it. You can get over it simply by having a sense of the ridiculous. You do not see how absurd a selfish man is. He always thinks of himself, bringing everything round to himself, ruled by considerations of his small person, putting himself at the centre of the universe and trying to organise the universe, including God, around himself, as if he was the most important item of the universe. Now, if you just try to look at yourself from outside in a dispassionate way, see yourself as in a mirror, you immediately recognise how ridiculous your little person is. I remember I read in French, translated of course, a line from Tagore which amused me very much. It was about a little dog. The dog was seated in the lap of its mistress and considered itself to be the centre of the universe. Yes, the picture struck in my mind. I knew actually a little dog who was like that. There are many of the kind, perhaps all: they want that everybody should be busy with them and they succeed in doing so.

You have to go a long way before you can think of merging your ego, your self in the Divine. First of all, you cannot merge your ego or your self until you are a completely individualised being. And do you know what does that mean—'to be completely individualised'? It means one capable of resisting all external influences. The other day I received a letter from someone who says that he hesitates to read books; for he has a very strong tendency to identify himself with what he reads; if he reads a novel or a drama he becomes the character pictured

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and is possessed by the feelings and thoughts and movements of the character. There are many like that. If they read something, while they read they are completely moved by the ideas and impulsions and even ideals they read about and are totally absorbed in them and become them, without their knowing it even. That is because ninety-nine percent of their nature is made of butter as it were: if you press your finger it leaves a mark. That is the ordinary man's character. One takes in, as one comes across, a thought experienced by another, a phrase read in a book, a thing observed or an incident eyes fall upon, a will or wish of a neighbour, all that enters pell-mell intermixed—enters and goes out, others come in—like electric currents. And one does not notice it. There is a conflict, a clash among these various movements, each trying to get the upper hand. Thus the person is tossed to and fro like a piece of cork upon the waves in the sea.

Instead of this unformed and unconscious mass, one has to become conscious, cohesive, individualised, that which exists by itself and in itself, independently of its surroundings, that which can hear, read, see anything and will not change because of that. It receives from outside only what it wishes to receive. It rejects automatically what does not agree with its purpose: nothing can leave any impression upon it, unless it wishes to have the impress. It is thus that one begins to be individualised. And when one is an individual, then only can one make a gift of it, for unless you possess a thing

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you cannot give it; when you have or are nothing you can give nothing. So in order that the separate ego may disappear, one must be able to give oneself wholly, totally without restrictions. And to be able to give, one must exist and to exist one must be an individual. If your body were not rigid as it is—the body is indeed terribly rigid—if it were not something quite fixed and if you had not this solid skin around the skeleton, if you were the exact expression of what you are vitally and mentally, it would be worse than the gelatinous jelly fish. All would enter and melt into one another, what a chaos and confusion would it be! That is why a rigid form is given at the outset. And you complain: the physical is so fixed, it lacks plasticity, suppleness—it lacks the fluidity that enables one to melt into the Divine! But it was a necessity. For if you were out of your body and entered into the regions behind—the vital,—you would see how things stand there: things get mixed, separated, intertwined, all kinds of vibrations, currents, forces that come and go, struggle and fight, seize each other, absorb each other, repulse each other! Very difficult to find a personality in all that. It is only forces, movements, impulsions, desires. Not that there are not individuahties and personalities there too! But they are Powers. They who have individualised themselves in such a world are either heroes or demons!

And then in the mind, if you become conscious only of the physical mind, apart from what belongs to the brain, independent of the head, you will see that it is

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really a market place, as it has been called: everything enters here, all kinds of ideas and notions cross and recross and move about, jostle one another, knock against each other—there are even accidents sometimes. There you can search, but search in vain to find where your own mind lies.

One needs years of labour—organising, selecting, building up very diligently, very carefully, very rationally, very cohesively, in order simply to form oneself: to form, this simple thing, for example, to think in one's own way. You believe you think in your own way, you do not know how much you depend for your thoughts upon the people you speak to, upon the books that you read, upon your varying moods; yes, it depends not unoften upon your good or bad digestion, upon the fact of your being closed in a room or free in the open air, upon the scenery around you, upon sun or shower. You do not notice it, but you think of different things in different ways according to conditions or situations which have nothing to do with your own self. So, I say, to have your thoughts coordinated, cohesive, logical, you would need a long, very long work in minute details. And then, that is the most important part of the thing, when you have come to a beautiful mental structure, well-shaped, very strong, very powerful, the first thing you will be told to do is that you must break it up, if you wish to be united with the Divine! And unless and until you have done the first part you cannot do the second part, unless you form yourself you cannot give yourself, you would

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have nothing to give to the Divine. Your are nothing more than a mass of inchoate things which are not yourself. First you must exist, you must be, before you can give yourself.

At the present moment in the actual state of things what one can give to the Divine is one's body. But that is precisely the thing that one does not give. Yes, try to consecrate your work, your bodily labour; even there, there are so many things that are not true or correct.

You may naturally ask how to melt the body in the Divine? You say you understand somewhat melting the mind, melting the vital, thoughts and emotions, ideas and aspirations into the Divine, but the body? It cannot be melted as in a cauldron! And yet that is the only thing upon which you can put your personal name—although that too is only a convention—and say this is I. Of course if you look at yourself in a mirror, you see clearly you are not what you were twenty years ago, you are now quite different, quite unrecognisable. Still you have the perception that it is the same person, yourself. You can begin your giving by that which is most formed, most known to you as yourself.

I do not mean to confront you with complicated movements. What I say is this that if you speak of melting into the Divine or uniting with the Divine, you must first of all know what you are. You are apparently the ego. It is there. The ego is meant to make you conscious, an independent, individualised being—that is to say, you must not be a market place where all kinds of

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movements mix and jostle; you must be able to exist in yourself. The ego is for that and that is why you have a skin, to form a closed circle (allowing, of course, things to infiltrate through its pores, so to say, but it must be at your will and bid).

You must form yourself, you must be conscious of yourself—not in a general way but in every detail. Every detail of what you call yourself must be organised around one centre, your true self, the divine being in you, so that the whole may be a cohesive organised entity. When thus wholly conscious, harmoniously organised around the divine centre, then it can be wholly consecrated, united to the Divine: then the time comes, the Divine permits the true union to be made. When the individualisation is complete then He lets you merge your ego into the Divine, you live and exist for the Divine alone.

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Love Divine

"The intensity of Divine Love does not produce any perturbation in any part of the being" (The Elements of Yoga). Why should it? If there is aperturbation, it is more likely that a different kind of love was in question. If it is Divine Love, there can be no perturbation, for each one receives it according to his capacity,

Divine Love is there in its full intensity, as a tremendous force. But most people, 99 out of 100, feel nothing at all. What they feel is exactly in proportion to what they are, what they can receive and hold. Indeed, you are always bathed in an atmosphere vibrant with Divine Love. Sometimes, on rare occasions, for a few seconds perhaps, there is all on a sudden just the impression of something, and you say: "there, the Divine Love came to me!" Well, it is a way of saying: the true fact being that for some reason or other you happened to be just a little open and you had the perception of the thing that is always with you. The Love is there, the divine consciousness, too, is there in the same way. They are one, after all. They are there all the while; only you do not feel it or do so only spasmodically. Once in a way you find yourself, without any rhyme or reason

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as it were, in that happy state and you declare that the Divine Love has at last turned towards you! But, as I say, the matter is not like that. There came about an opening in you, perhaps no more than a pinpoint, and that was sufficient for the thing to rush in; for the atmosphere is surcharged with it and wherever there is a possibility of its being received, it is received. The same is true of all things divine. They are there: you do not receive or perceive them, because you are closed, shut off, blocked up. You are occupied, most of the time with other things. You are full of yourself, packed with it, and there is no room for anything else. You are not merely passively filled with yourself, but very actively, you are furiously busy with yourself. How can you notice then the marvellous things that are about you, around you? You get a glimpse unawares, perhaps when you are asleep; but it fades away soon. Man's ego is a formidable thing; the whole universe, to him, is a mere function of the ego. You are the centre and the entire creation revolves around you. Such is your vision of the universe. You do not see it as it is; you see only yourself when you look at it.

To begin, then, you must be able to come out of your ego. You will have to enter, as the first step, into something like a state of inexistence. Thereafter only you will begin to see things as they are, that is to say, from a height. If you want to see things as they truly are, you must become absolutely like a mirror—silent, peaceful, immobile, impartial, with no preference, in a state of

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total receptivity. You will begin to see many things that did not seem to be there before, but only now becoming active. Well, you may very well have gone inside one of these things instead of being shut up into a minute spot in the infinite universe, which you call yourself. There are many ways by which you can come out of yourself. Anyhow that is the one thing to be done, if you wish to see the world as it is, not as it seems to be a function of yourself.

Now to come out of the ego, you must have naturally, first of all, the will to do so. The surest way to do it is to give yourself to the Divine, not to pull the Divine towards you but to abandon yourself to Him. That is how you start forgetting yourself. Usually when people think of the Divine, the immediate impulse in them is to pull Him (or whatever they represent Him to be) towards themselves, within themselves. The result generally is that they receive nothing; and they complain: "Oh, I called and called, I prayed and prayed, but there was no answer, I received nothing, nothing came". But before complaining, ask yourself if you had offered yourself. You would find that instead of offering yourself you had pulled. Instead of being generous, open-handed and open-hearted, you were a miser, a beggar. When you pull you remain wholly within yourself, shut up, sealed within your ego. You raise a wall of separation between you and the thing that is around you and wants to come in, which is thus not admitted, almost deliberately refused entrance. You enclose yourself

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within a prison and grumble that you have nothing, feel nothing. At least if you had opened a window you would have had something of the light and air about you.

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GENERAL

Buddha and Shankara

(I)

To escape from life is a teaching based on the view that life is an illusion. The teaching began with Buddha. Buddha said that life or existence is the fruit of desire and that there was only one way of getting out of the misery, namely, to go out of existence. Shankara continued in that line. He added, however, that existence was not merely the fruit of desire, but that it was altogether an illusion and that so long as one lives in that illusion, one cannot realise the Divine. For him the Divine—the Supreme Divine—did not exist. I believe his view was something to that effect. In any case, for the Buddha there was no God.

Both of them came in contact with something true and real. Buddha had surely an inner contact with something which, in relation to the outer life, appeared to him as non-existence and in this non-existence all the consequences of existence disappeared. There is indeed such a state. And it is said that if you remain in that state for more than twenty days, you are sure to lose your body. I believe it is so, if the condition becomes exclusive. But also it can be an experience that remains behind, exists in a conscious way and yet not exclusively.

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In other words, the contact with the world and the outer consciousness is maintained and supported by something which is independent of them and free. It is a state in which you can make truly a great progress in your external consciousness; for then you can detach yourself from everything and act without attachment, without preference, in an inner freedom that expresses itself in the outer life. Once you have attained the inner freedom, this conscious contact with the eternal and the infinite, you must return to action without losing that consciousness and allow it to influence the whole of the consciousness turned to action.

That is what Sri Aurobindo calls bringing down the Force from above. That way lies the only chance of changing the world; for you seek there a new Force, a new domain, a new consciousness and you put that in contact with the external world. Its presence and its action will bring changes inevitably, a total transformation, we hope, in the external world.

(2)

There is no doubt that Buddha had the first part of the experience; but he never thought of the second part, for it was contrary to his own theory. That theory was that one must escape. And it is obvious that there is only one way of escaping and that is to die. And yet, as he had said it himself very well, one may die and yet

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remain attached to life and continue to be in the cycle of rebirths without having the liberation. As a matter of fact, it is through the successive sojourns upon earth that one grows till one arrives at this liberation. For him the ideal is that where the world exists no longer. It is as if he accused God for having committed an error by creating a world and the only thing to be done is to repair the error by annulling it. Naturally, as thoroughly reasonable and logical, he did not admit the existence of God. But then by whom was the error committed? When and how did it come about? He never answered these questionings. He simply said that the world began with desire and with the end of desire it must end.

He was on the brink of saying that the world was purely subjective, that is to say, a collective illusion, and if the illusion ceased the world would also cease. But he did not go so far. It was Shankara who took up the line and completed the teaching.

In the more ancient wisdom, however, if one goes back to the teaching of the Vedic Rishis, for example, one finds no idea of escape from the world; they sought a realisation upon earth and they even conceived a golden age when this realisation would be achieved.

It is without doubt since the teaching of Buddha that the idea of escape came in; and that has gradually undermined the vitality of the country for it meant an endeavour to cut oneself away from life. The outward reality became a false illusion and one should have nothing to do with it. The natural result was that one

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cut oneself away from the universal energy and so vitality went on diminishing, and with diminishing vitality, all possibility of terrestrial realisation also diminished.

(3)

Some say that the Buddha was an Avatara, others say he was not.

To use the names as known in India, I think it is the Avataras of Vishnu (the aspect of the Divine that builds and preserves), who come to prove that the Divine can live upon earth; whereas, each time that Shiva has manifested (the aspect that works to transform and destroy), it was in persons who have tried to fight against illusion and demolish what existed.

I have reasons to think that the Buddha manifested something of the Shiva power. It was the same compassion and comprehension for all misery and it was the same force that destroys, evidendy with the intention of transforming, but destroying more than constructing.

His work does not seem to have been very constructive indeed. It was necessary to give a practical training to man not to be egoistic. In that way it proved to be useful.

But taken in its fundamental principle it has not helped much in the transformation of earth and earthly life. It has not encouraged the descent of a higher Consciousness into earthly life; instead it has very strongly encouraged

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the separation of the Consciousness, which he said was the only truth, from all external expression,

And as to the existence or manifestation of the Divine upon earth, they who believed in Buddha have now made him a God. You have only to look at the Buddhist temples and all their divinities to know that human nature has always the tendency to deify what it admires.

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The Significance of Dates

Does a particular date or a series of date's carry any special significance ?

The way of framing a calendar is a convention. If the convention is made general, as there is an attempt now to do, it can become a very powerful formation. But in order to become significant for many, many must first accept it. I mean by a formation an image infused with a force that makes it something living, an image which can be used as a symbol. There are people who may form images and use them as symbols, but all is done only for themselves, as in the case of dream-symbols. These are purely subjective and valid in so far as those people are personally concerned.

But if your calendar is adopted by almost the whole of mankind, then the symbol is capable of acting upon a very wide field. You can act upon the major population through this formation. As it is purely conventional, I repeat, it is fruitful only in the measure in which it has been accepted. If instead of millions of people who are now following the European calendar there were only three or four persons, then it would be symbolic only for these few. The thing itself has no value, its value depends upon the use you make of it.

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The conventions are useful as symbols, I said,— that is, they are a means to put you in contact with what is more subtle, to put what is material in contact with the more subtle. That is their use.

Here comes also the error which people make in respect of stars and horoscopes. For all that is simply a language and a convention. If you accept the convention you can use it for a particular work. But it has value and importance only in proportion to the number of people who believe in it. But if you simplify, the more you do so the more the thing becomes a superstition. For, what is superstition? It is the abuse of generalisation from a particular.

I always give the example of a person passing under a ladder. A man was working on its top-rung and accidentally he dropped his instrument on the person below who got his head broken. The witness of this whole incident then made a general rule that to pass under a ladder was a bad sign. Well, it is superstition pure and simple.

In fact, much of our knowledge originates in the same way. Thus, a certain medicine is found, because of favourable circumstances, to cure a number of people of a particular disease. Then it is announced that the medicine is an absolute remedy for that disease. But it is not true. If the same medicine is given to a hundred persons, it will affect them in a hundred different ways: sometimes the reactions are quite opposite. In no two cases will the result be similar. Therefore it is not the

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Virtue of the medicine itself that effects the cure. It is a superstition to believe in the absolute efficacy of medicines.

But going further we can say that there is very little difference between science and superstition! The only difference is in the manner of expressing oneself. If you take care to say like the scientists, "it seems it is like that, one might conclude that things appear like that" etc., etc., then it is no longer superstition. But if you assert point-blank, "it is like that", then you land in superstition.

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The Value of Money

The more one has money, the more one falls into a calamity. It is indeed a calamity, my children.

It is a catastrophe to have money. It makes you stupid, it makes you avaricious, it makes you wicked. It is one of the biggest calamities in the world. Money is a thing which one should not possess unless and until he is without desire, without attachment. When one has a consciousness as wide as the earth, then only one can have all the money there is upon earth and that would be good for everybody. But until then as much money you have, so much the curse there is upon you. I will tell this to the face of everybody, even to the face of the man who considers it a merit to be rich. It is a calamity; it is also perhaps a disgrace, a fall from the Divine Grace, the expression of a Divine discontent.

It is infinitely more difficult to be rich and also to be wise, intelligent and generous—to be generous, please note,— when one is rich than when one is poor. I have seen and known many persons in many countries; the most generous persons were always the poorest. As soon as the pocket becomes full, you are seized as if with a malady, a sordid attachment to money. I assure you it is a malediction.

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So the first thing to do when one has money is to give it away. But as you should know, it must not be given without discrimination. Do not give it in the way a philanthropist does; for that only fills him with the sense of his kindness, his generosity, his importance. You must do it with a sattwic sense, that is to say, see where is the best possible use of it. Everyone then has to find in his own consciousness, the highest consciousness he has, what is the best possible use of the money one has.

As a matter of fact, money has value only so far as it is in circulation. For each and everyone money has worth only if and when it is spent. Man has taken care to choose for money a material that does not deteriorate, gold and silver, for example, but all the same it rots, from the moral point of view, if it does not circulate. Nowadays paper is used in place of metal, but if you keep the bundle of paper in your drawer, you will find in course of time all your hoarding worn out, eaten up. Worms and insects would present you with a lace-work that your Banks would refuse to accept!

There are peoples and religions who say that God makes them poor whom he loves. I do not know if it is true, but one thing true is this that when one is born rich or when one becomes rich, in any case when one has much, that is to say, in material wealth, it is certainly not a sign that the Divine has chosen him for His Grace; he must needs make a good deal of amende honorable life is to walk on the hstraight road, the true path towards the Divine.

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Wealth is a force; it is, I told you once already, a force of Nature. It should be a means of circulation, a power in movement, even as water that flows is a power in movement. It is something which serves to produce, to organise. It is a convenient means—for at bottom it is only a means—for the full and free circulation of commodities. And this force must be in the hands of those who know how to make the best possible use of it, in other words, in the hands, as I have already said, of those who have abolished in them, who are somehow freed from, all personal desire, all attachment. To that must be added also a vision wide enough to understand the needs of the earthly life, a complete knowledge capable of organising those needs and using this force to meet them.

Over and above this, if such people possess a higher spiritual consciousness, then they can use the force to build slowly upon earth something that will be able to manifest the Divine Power and the Divine Grace. It is then that this force of money, of wealth, this power of Finance, instead of being a curse, as I have said, would be a blessing for the welfare of all. The saying goes that it is the worst people who become the best. I hope the best do not become the worst, for that would be sad indeed.

The greatest power, when used ill, can be a very great calamity; the same power used well can be a blessing.

All depends on the use that is made of a thing. Each object has a place, a function, a true use in the world. In the world, as it is, however, very few things are used

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for their true purpose, very few things are in their right place. The world is in a frightful chaos. That is why there is all this misery, all this suffering. If each thing were in its own place, all in a harmonious poise, the whole world would progress without any necessity of getting into the state of misery and suffering in which it is now.

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The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 8