The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 8

Prayer and Aspiration

(I)

What you do has an inevitable and absolute consequence. This is a necessary concept at a given moment of the evolutionary process. It is meant to prevent men from becoming completely egoistic or doing what they do in a totally unconscious manner. There are many who are like that, the majority, I suppose; they follow their impulses and do not ask what consequences their actions will have for themselves and for others. It is good then if someone told them with a severe air: "Take care, that has consequences which last long, very long". There are religions that rose to warn you: "You will pay for that in another life", "If you commit this sin, you will go into hell for eternity" and so on. That is, however, a most fantastic story that man has invented; still, people are frightened and checked in someway. It spares them a moment for reflection before they run after their impulses, not always, sometimes the reflection comes after, a little late.

In all religions people who declared that the consequences of Karma are rigorous and who gave these absolute rules, must have done so, I believe, to put themselves in place of Nature, to pull the strings that move ordinary men. For these rules are mental construetions,

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more or less sincere perhaps, cutting things into bits and telling you: "Do this, do that; it is not this, it is that." People are confused, frightened, they do not know what to do at the end.

What they must do is to get to an upper floor. And they must be given the key to open the door. The key is (1) a sufficiently sincere aspiration, or (2) a sufficiently intense prayer. I said or, but it may not be so; there are people who like the one and there are people who prefer the other. But in both there is magic power and one must know to use them.

There are some who detest prayers. If they entered deep into their heart, they would see that it is pride, even worse than that, vanity. There are people who have no aspiration, they try but they are not able. They are not able, because they have not the flame of the will, nor have they the flame of humility. Both are necessary. To change one's Karma one needs a great humility and a great will-power.

The Divine Grace counteracts the Karma wholly; the Grace melts Karma, as the sun melts butter. If you have an aspiration sincere enough, or, a prayer intense enough you can bring down into you something that will change everything.

(2)

I have already spoken to you of the different planes of consciousness. On the purely material plane (separating

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it from the vital), it is all absolutely mechanistic: there things follow each in a rigid chain of cause and effect. If you want to find the cause of a thing, you will have to find the cause of the cause; and if you want to find the effect of a thing you will have to find also the effect of the effect. The causes and effects linked together form a closed ring. Only, into this purely material plane there can intervene and does intervene the vital plane, as for example in the vegetable kingdom.

The vital plane has a totally different determinism, which is its own. And when you bring the vital determinism into physical determinism, that makes a combination which changes everything.

Above the vital plane lies the mental plane. The mental plane too has its own determinism in which all mental things are chained together in a rigorous sequence.

Each of these planes has what may be called a horizontal determinism.

But, as I say, there is also a vertical movement. That is, the mental descends into the vital and the vital descends into the physical. Thus there are three determinisms which intervene and produce something that is quite different.

Where the mind intervenes the determinism will necessarily be different from the determinism where it does not intervene. In the higher animal life there is already an intervening mental determinism which is quite different from the determinism on the vegetal plane. Above these planes there are others up to the highest.

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The highest plane is the plane of absolute freedom.

If you are capable of traversing all these planes in your consciousness, so to say, in a vertical line and reach the highest and then, through this joining up, if you are able to bring down this determinism of perfect freedom into the material determinism, then you change everything. And all the intermediaries also will undergo the change. Because of these changes it will all look like total freedom. For the intervention or the descent of one plane upon another will have unforeseen consequences for the lower one. The higher planes may foresee, but the lower ones cannot. Being unforeseen, things and events have then an air of the absolutely free and the totally unexpected.

It is only when you live consciously and constantly on the highest level, that is to say, the level of the supreme consciousness, that you are able to see that everything is absolutely determined, but at the same time by the very complexity of the intermixture of these determinisms everything is absolutely free. You may call this phenomenon as you like, but it is a kind of absolute determinism and absolute freedom combined. It is the level where there are no contradictions, where all things exist and exist in harmony without contradicting each other.

(3)

Everything is possible. It is a gradual unfolding along a highway, as it were, which is unknown and unknowable

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to you. In the universe all will be unfolded. But in what order and in what way? Everything is there absolutely, eternally but static. Everything is going to come out into the material world, naturally, more or less one after another. What course will the unfolding follow?

Up there, it is the domain of absolute freedom. Who tells you that a sufficiently sincere aspiration, a sufficiently intense prayer cannot change the course of the unfolding? It means everything is possible. This is one wonderful grace that has been granted to human nature. Only one does not know how to make use of it.

So, in spite of the most absolute determinism in the horizontal line, one can, if one is able to cross it and reach the highest point of consciousness, change what appears to be absolutely determined.

All theories are mere theories, that is to say, mental conceptions which are only representations or images of the reality, they are not the reality at all. When you say "determinism" or "liberty", you say only words. All that is very incomplete, very feeble description of That which Is, in truth, within you, around you, everywhere. And if you are even to begin to understand what the universe is like, you must come out of these mental formulas; otherwise you will never understand.

Indeed, if you live just for a minute only by this absolutely sincere aspiration, this adequately intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for long hours.

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