Champaklal's Treasures

“The Wizard of Oz”

A short explanation will surely increase the interest of the picture shown to you tonight.

You will notice that it is in three sections, two black and one, the most extensive, in colour; the two black sections (first and last) show how things appear in the physical world, the coloured one expresses a similar sequence of events in the vital world, the world where one can go in deep sleep when one gets out of the body. So long as you have a body no true harm can happen to you in the vital world for the physical body acts like a protection and you can always return into it at will.

This is expressed in the picture in a classical way. You will see that the little girl wears on her feet some magic red slippers and that so long as she keeps the slippers on her feet, nothing wrong can truly happen to her. The ruby red slippers are the sign and the symbol of the connection with the physical body and so long as the slippers are on her feet she can at will return to her body and take shelter therein.

Two other details can be noted with interest. One is the snow shower that saves the party from the influence of the wicked witch who by her black magic has stopped their advance towards the blue castle of knowledge and intellectual power. In the vital, snow is the symbol of purity itself. It is the purity of their feelings and intentions that saves them from the great danger.

Note that to go to the castle of the good wizard they must follow the big path of golden bricks, the path of luminous confidence and joy.

The second is when Dorothy throws water on the straw man to save him from burning, some water falls on the face of the wicked witch who at once gets dissolved and dies. The water is the symbol of the power of purification and no hostile being or force can resist this power handled with good will and sincerity.

Finally when the good fairy teaches to the little girl, on knocking her two red slippers one against the other, how to go back home, by home she means the physical world which is the place of protection and realisation.

As you see the subject of this picture is interesting and not altogether deprived of knowledge; unhappily the whole set up is not as beautiful and harmonious as it could have been. There are some serious mistakes of taste and many regrettable vulgarities.

There is only one thing of which I am absolutely sure, and that is who lam. Sri Aurobindo also knew it and declared it. Even the doubts of the whole of humanity would change nothing to this fact.

But another fact is not so certain—it is the usefulness of my being here in a body doing the work I am doing. It is not out of any personal urge that I am doing it. Sri Aurobindo told me to do it and that is why I do it as a sacred duty, in obedience to the dictates of the Supreme.

Time will reveal how far earth has benefitted through it.

A self-willed man can not be grateful, because when he gets what he wants he gives all the credit for it to his own will, and when he gets what he does not want he resents it badly and throws all the blame on whoever he considers responsible. God, man or nature.

Compassion and gratitude are purely psychic virtues. They appear in the consciousness only with the participation of the psychic being in active life. The vital and physical feel them as weaknesses because they put a check upon the free expression of their impulsions based on the power of force.

As usual, the mind, when it is not sufficiently educated, is the accomplice of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature whose crushing laws it does not know well through their half-conscious mechanism. When the mind awakens to the consciousness of the first psychic movements, it deforms them in its ignorance and changes compassion into pity and gratitude into the will to recompense which is transformed gradually into the capacity to recognise and admire. It is only when the psychic consciousness is all-powerful in the being that compassion for all that is below it on the evolutionary ladder and gratitude for all that is higher than it, in whatever form, manifest in their initial and luminous purity, not containing any vestige of the sense of condescension in the compassion or of inferiority in the gratitude.

In the Bible, God calls Cain and asks him: 'What have you done with your brother?'

Today I call man and ask him: “What have you done with the earth?”

You have brought down upon earth Peace and Freedom.

Now Freedom and Wisdom must manifest in the heart of every man.

Have you never been mistaken in any of your decisions? Yes, you have been mistaken, haven't you? and many a time.

Then, by what right do you think that when my decision is not the same as yours, it is I who am mistaken?

'... stand at street-corners, hat held out for alms. Had we diplomatically sided with a religious or political body, we would be nourishing, but the divine white radiance must have no stain.

Selfless work, the self-giving to the realisation of an ideal is for ordinary men something so unthinkable that they hasten to sully it so as not to have to admire it.

... are at one in vilifying the Ashram and bespattering it with their mud. It is the old story that repeats itself.... The worst enemies come together when it is a question of stoning a prophet, crucifying God or condemning a sage to death.

To do good work one must have good taste.

Taste can be educated by study and the help of those who have good taste.

To learn, it is necessary to feel first that one does not know.

15.12.65

Never I sit in meditation—there is no time and no necessity for it because it is not through meditation that one gives oneself to the Divine, it is through consecration and surrender and it is through all activities of life that consecration and surrender are to be made.

26.11.67

Until now, my spontaneous attitude was that of the supreme Mother who carries the universe in her loving arms, and I was dealing with each one as with the child from whom she tolerates everything equally; and all what the people here were doing to please me I was taking as a token of their love and I was very grateful for it. Today I have learnt that many, if not most/are looking at me as their Guru and that they are eager to please me because to please the Guru is the best way to acquire merit on the path. And then I have understood that the duty of the Guru is to encourage from each one only that which can lead him quickly to the Lord and serve His Divine Purpose,—and I am very grateful for the lesson.

In our way of working we must not be the slaves of Nature; all these habits of trying and changing¹, doing and undoing and redoing again and again, wasting energy, labour, material and money, are Nature's way of action, not the Divine's. The Divine Consciousness sees first the truth of a work, the best way of doing it according to given circumstances, and when She acts, it is final, She never comes back on what is done, She goes forward, using failure as well as success for a new progress, one more step towards the goal.

In order to progress, Nature destroys while the Divine Consciousness stimulates growth and finally transforms.

We have faith in Sri Aurobindo.

He represents for us something we formulate to ourselves with words which seem to us the most exact for expressing our experience. These words are evidently the best according to us for formulating our experience.

But if, in our enthusiasm, we were convinced that they are the only appropriate words to express correctly what Sri Aurobindo is and the experience he has given us, we would become dogmatic and be on the point of founding a religion.

He who has a spiritual experience and a faith formulates it in the most appropriate words for himself.

But if he is convinced that this expression is the only correct and true one for this experience and faith, he becomes dogmatic and tends to create a religion.

Forward! towards a better future, the realisation of tomorrow.

To cure oneself: [of] a critical judgment expressing itself through an incontinence of speech

1) When one is in this state to refuse absolutely to speak—if need be to make it physically impossible for oneself to speak.

2) To study oneself pitilessly and become aware that one carries in oneself precisely all the things one finds so riduculous in others.

3) To discover in one's nature the state contrary to this (benevolence, humility, goodwill) and insist on developing it to the detriment of the opposite element.

In all religious and specially occult initiations, the ritual of the different ceremonies is prescribed in all detail; all the words pronounced, all the gestures made have their importance and the least infraction of the rule, the least fault committed can have fatal consequences.

It is the same in the material life and if one had the initiation into the true way of living, one could transform the physical existence.

This body has neither the uncontested authority of a god nor the imperturbable calm of the sage. It is yet only an apprentice in supermanhood.

On the choice of a motor-car:

Do you want to go from one place to another without getting tired and without spending much time on the way, or do you want to be smart and look like an important man?

And the body says to the Supreme Lord: “What You want me to be, I shall be, what You want me to know, I shall know, what You want me to do, I shall do.”

And you want to make me speak and mentalise the experience until a new “system” is established and you can sit down comfortably in your new mental construction.

By definition the Ashramite has resolved to consecrate his life to the realisation and service of the Divine.

For this four virtues are indispensable, without which progress is uncertain and subject to interruptions and troublesome falls at the first opportunity:

Sincerity, faithfulness, modesty and gratitude.

... substitute the spirit of rivalry and competition by the goodwill of collaboration and mutual understanding.

liberty and order
fraternity and independence
equality and hierarchy
unity and diversity
abundance and scarcity
effort and repose
power and compassion
discernment and benevolence
generosity and economy
wastage and avarice

Obey your soul, it alone has the right to govern your life.

In their blindness men leave the Light and go to the darkness to obtain knowledge!
... so that his life may be governed by a true splendour of soul, so as to face his responsibilities with a noble and generous heart.

And the radiant bliss of this splendour was felt in a perfect peace.

Transformation and intimacy
with my blessings full of love and energy.

21.6.70