The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 8

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.¹ Such 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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