The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 6

EVER GREEN!

When you have an inner experience, there is a natural tendency in you to have it again, to repeat it, and to repeat it, you go by the same way and in the same manner. When you sit in meditation, for example, you withdraw yourself from outward contacts and enter into a condition with which you have become familiar, which has pleased you and which you consider sufficiently high and a commendable poise of consciousness. Thus whenever you sit down to meditation, you forthwith get into your habitual condition automatically, without any effort and you remain there as long as you like. Evidently, the experience has become a matter of habit i.e. mechanical and lifeless, but you do not perceive it, you have become so unconscious. That means you do not progress any more, you have shut yourself, as it were, in a closed box. If you continue, you may do so your whole life in that way, but you will not have advanced a single step; on the contrary, you will have regressed a good deal.

The great secret of progress—and also of permanent youthfulness—is to feel at every moment that you are just beginning your life and your life experience. Always

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you start afresh; even if you are on the same path and seem to be moving in the same direction for the hundredth time, you must feel as if it was for the first time that you undertook the journey, it was your virgin attempt towards a new discovery. Forget all past ideas, notions, experiences that crowd your mind; sweep away all the accumulated dust that has cumbered your brain; make your consciousness as clean and clear as that of a newborn babe—all straightened out, with none of the convolutions and wrinkles of an aged cerebrum. Always you will come into contact with the world and things in all the simplicity and spontaneity of a pure consciousness and always the world and things will bring to you their unending wonder and beauty and truth.

Whenever you go inside and seek your poise, do not look for your old acquaintances, the familiar experiences, do not carry upon your back the load of the past, but go ahead, as if through a virgin tract, making quite new discoveries and opening unexpected vistas at each step. You can make an experiment even on your physical body, i.e. take the physical consciousness too to share in your adventure of ever new discovery. Thus you may, for example, forget your habit of eating or even walking, truly forget and try to learn over again, even as you did for the first time as a child. You have to acquire consciously a capacity of

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the body that has become an almost unconscious reflex action. It is a wonderful and exhilarating experience. Naturally you cannot repeat too often or carry too far an experiment of this kind on the physical plane. But you can freely deal with your inner life and consciousness. You can make your mind and your vital a clean slate, as much as you like; not once in your life, but every moment of your life. And then see how the world impinges upon your consciousness, what fresh discoveries and awakenings come to you endlessly! You can always rid yourself of the accustomed vibrations on the normal levels of your existence, the physical, vital and mental; and even you can go beyond your psychic formation and be the wide, the vast, the limitless, the Infinite itself, void of all name and form. And then with that virgin consciousness drop straight into the world of material life and form, into your body and bodily reactions. The world will give itself up to you in its pristine purity, its original beauty and truth, always luminous and glorious. This experience has to be the normal mode of your living, not simply the culmination or acme of your being, a fixed and stagnant status, even if considered the highest, the summum bonum. That is how you can keep yourself and the world around you ever fresh and young and new.

The preacher who speaks of the truth and delivers it to his hearers is usually effective for the first time or for

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a first few occasions only, when he feels the truth of his truth and is sincere while delivering. But as time wears on, his truth too wears out, for it becomes stereotyped, a matter of mere habit. The experience is no longer lived, but mechanically doled out. You are sincere only when the experience is new and fresh and living, it should be made so every moment, otherwise it is dead letter, letter that killeth.

That is the secret of spiritual life and even of normal life. To keep it ever green you must know how to pour into it a continuous flow of new sap. Look upon yourself, look upon the world always with fresh eyes— never burdened or obscured by the scales that past experiences and acquisitions have collected. Unlearn the past, always begin from the beginning as a beginner —every moment a fresh impact, a new revelation, an unexpected opening. That is how life remains ever young and ever progressive.

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