The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 6

DIRECTED CHANGE

Never to be bound by the experiences of the past, never to try to recover and stick to the knowledge or realisation gained, even though it may appear particularly precious or unique. This is a motto you should always keep before your mind. When you try to repeat what you have once said, done or experienced, you arc sure to find very soon that the thing is becoming more and more lifeless, mechanical, a matter of routine and therefore perfectly useless. The soul has disappeared, the skeleton remains. You must live the word you utter at the time of uttering it, you must live the experience that you wish to recall or express. It is only thus that truth becomes living, possesses its force and light and gains its full value.

In point of fact, however, no two succeeding moments, whether in your consciousness or in the world movement, are exactly the same. Even if you try seriously and sincerely, you can never recapture a thing of the past as it was or as it came to you, not, that is to say, in the same exact manner. For you are no longer the same nor is the world. The world is is a continuous flow, it has been very often declared:

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but it is not a continual repetition or recurrence, a mere cyclic order. On the other hand, constant renewal is the very character of the change. At every moment something new is coming down on the scene, something that was not surges out: Nature is bringing out at every step something that was hidden or latent in her secret depth, something is thrown down from above into her normal movement, something unforeseen and unexpected. The march of time means evolution, that is to say, the addition of a new factor to the existing factors, making manifest something that was unmanifest—mṛtam kancana bodhayanti, as the Vedic Rishi says. Even if to an apparent sight everything seems to remain the same, yet it is not so in reality; always a new element is being poured into the existing circumstances, always an additional spark or influence enters into actual play of forces. It is the accumulated presure of all the variables that brings about the great changes upon earth and in humanity which are summed up in the word evolution—changes cosmological and psychological.

You have to accept this principle of change and move on—to be one with the cosmic spirit,—never to stand still or turn back, but look forward and forge ahead. To be stagnant means to die and be fossilised. Now, if things change continually, it means things can change and must be changed. Only, one must

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see to the direction in which the change occurs. A change can be, after all, for better or for worse. And you have the power, if you are conscious with the right consciousness, to direct the change and even to initiate one of the right order. Have you ever climbed a hill? There are many ways, paths, issues leading towards the top, some more or less direct, some zig-zag, others winding or taking a long round. This does not matter, provided you look upward, have the sense of direction to the summit, then you mount up. Otherwise if you have your face downward or look below, you move downward away from the top. In the same way changes that happen will be directed according to the direction of your look. And there is only one direction towards which you must turn your look: towards the summit, towards the highest goal. It is to grow conscious, to grow more and more conscious—to be conscious of yourself, to be conscious of the universe and to be conscious of the Divine who dwells in you and permeates the world and then to manifest the Divine, in your physical life and in the physical life of the world.

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