Our Many Selves

Becoming Aware of the Highest in Oneself

How can one become aware of the central will?

Ah, this of course is another side of the problem. First of all one must become aware of what is highest, most true, most universal and eternal in one’s consciousness.

This is learnt gradually. One learns to discern among one’s ordinary, external movements and the different gradations of the movements of one’s inner consciousness. And if one continues to do this with a certain persistence, one realises what it is that puts this highest part of one’s being into motion, which represents the ideal of the being. There is no other way. Sometimes this awake through reading something, sometimes through a conversation, sometimes through a more or less dramatic, that is, unexpected event, which gives you a shock, shakes you up, brings you out of your usual little rut. Sometimes when you are in very great danger, suddenly you feel as though you are above yourself and beyond your small habitual weakness, having within you something higher which can hold out against circumstances.

Such occasions make you enter, first, into contact with that. Afterwards by a methodical discipline you can make the contact continuous; but usually this takes time. But first you get it like that, suddenly, for one reason or another.

(Long silence)

This may come with a very strong emotion, with a very great sorrow, a very great enthusiasm. When one is called to perform a fairly exceptional action, in circumstances which are a little exceptional, all of a sudden, one feels something as though breaking or opening within him, and one feels as though he were dominating himself, as though he had climbed up a higher rung and from there was looking at his own existence with the habitual sees. Once one has experienced this, one does not forget; even if only once it has happened, one does not forget it. And one can by concentration reproduce the state at will, later. This is the first step to cultivate it.

Afterwards one can very easily call up this state each time a decision is to be taken, and then one takes it in full awareness of the implications and foreseeing everything that’s going to happen. I don’t think there’s one individual in the world who hasn’t experienced it—in any case one cultured individual—at least once in his life, something that breaks and opens… and one understands. This seems to astonish you very much!… (To a child) You have never felt this, you? Yes?

I don’t know.

You are not sure! (Long silence)

When one has had it one feels that one has begun to live, that before this one did not know what life was. Suddenly one has entered fully into life. This is not forgotten.

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1954): 8 December 1954