The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 9

HOW CAN TIME BE A FRIEND?

It depends on the way you look at it. It depends on the relation you have with it. If you take it as a friend, it becomes a friend, if you consider it as an enemy, it becomes an enemy.

But, perhaps, what you wanted to ask is how to feel when it is an enemy and when it is a friend. Well, when you are impatient and say, "Oh, I cannot get to the end of the thing, oh, when shall I finish it ?" and when you are not able to do the thing immediately and get desperate, then time is your enemy. But when you say, "Well and good, I have not done this time, I shall do it next time, and I am sure, one day or another, I shall do it", then it becomes your friend.

Is time merely subjective or is there something concrete, something like a personality in it ?

Perhaps this also depends on how you look at it. All forces are personal forces, all forces of Nature are also personal forces. But if we

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look at them as impersonal things, our relation with them becomes impersonal. Take for example what has happened just now. If you were a meteorologist, you would calculate the currents of the wind, the pressures of the atmosphere etc., etc. and conclude : "Given all that, what has happened had exactly to happen and there will be so many days of rain and so on". So it is for you a force which you are obliged to call a force of Nature and you can only look at it quietly and wait for the fixed number of rainy days to pass.

But it may happen also that you are in a sort of personal relation with the little conscious beings that are behind wind and storm and rain, behind thunder and lightning and the so-called forces of Nature, which are, however, personal forces; then through the relation you establish a kind of friendship with them. And instead of looking at them as enemies and mechanical inexorables that you have simply to bear without being able to do anything, you arrive at a cordial understanding with them, you succeed in having an influence over them and you may tell them : "But why, you want to blow and pour here, why don't you do it just by the side where there is a field ?"

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And I have seen with my own eyes, here and in France and Algeria, the rain falling on a very definite spot exactly where it should rain, because it was dry and there was a field that needed to be watered. And at another place, just a few yards away, it was all sunny and dry, because the place needed to be sunny and dry. Naturally, if you proceed very scientifically, they will explain the thing scientifically; but as for myself, I saw it happen as the result of an intervention from someone who asked for it and got it.

I have told you of my experiences in Algeria. Very many interesting things happened there. For a certain atmosphere was there, an atmosphere, one might say, of a little more real knowledge. There were certain small beings, those that controlled or produced snow. They could come and enter into a room and say : "Now, it must snow here"—"But there has been no snow in this country ! Snow ? You don't mean that ? Near the Sahara, it's going to snow ?" —"It must snow, because they have planted fir trees on the mountain and when we see fir trees we come. Fir trees mean we are called and so we come." Thus there was a little discussion and the little beings went away with the permission to snow. The mountain was covered

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with snow. And it was quite near the Sahara. You come down a few miles and you reach the Sahara.

Someone took the fancy of covering the hills with fir and fir is a tree of cold countries. The beings were called in and there they came. All that is true fact, it is not an invention.

Everything depends on your relation. It may be that the meteorologists could explain the thing, explain it away, I do not know—they explain all things in all ways.

Things are as you look at them. That is the truth. I have seen other things also, not so pleasant as the one I have just described. For since men have invented—not invented but discovered things they did not know of, atomic bombs and things worse than that and have begun to play with them like babies, it has thoroughly upset the little beings which lived according to their own rhythm of life and were accustomed to habits that answered to events they could foresee. Now all that is changed and they have suffered in consequence. They have lost their head and they do not know what they do.

There was a time, at the end of the war, when things over there became terribly chaotic and one lived in the absurd and as the unfortunate experience continues, the little beings have not

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yet been able to come out of their maddening confusion. Yes, they have become maddened. Men play with things of which they know only the exterior, that is to say, which they do not know at all. Anything may happen, including, alas ! catastrophes that have been foretold long long ago.

That may happen and may not. It depends on the thing that will intervene.

I had once spoken to you of all that, of wind and cloud and rain and I told you to pray if you wanted the weather to change, but I am afraid you thought I was joking.

One thing is certain. It is this. If you are able to see the deeper law of things and if you are in contact with a higher consciousness in order to realise something that is far beyond all human conceptions, why should you be concerned with any human opinion ? Ordinary men have no notion of what spiritual life or divine realisation may be like. Naturally, it is precisely because of their ignorance they come and judge those things quite nonchalantly and advise you as to how you should live and move and act and be. They know nothing, they see nothing. Your attitude towards them should be one of supreme indifference. And yet you should not feel superior

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to them. On the other hand, you should be kind and wish that they should be reborn in the Light. You should avoid discussing with such people and never try to convince them, that would be a vain attempt. You should be absolutely indifferent, indifferent to their criticisms and indifferent to their praise. You should know it is easier to be indifferent to criticism than to compliments. I tell you a story in this connection.

I have spoken to you more than once of Madame D.N. She was a militant personality and a great Buddhist luminary. When she came to India she wanted to see some of the great Indian sages, Gurus, that is to say, and she went to one of them —I do not give you his name—who looked at her and asked her, as the talk was about Yoga and personal effort and all that, whether she was indifferent to criticism. She answered him in the classical expression : "Does one mind the barking of a dog ?" She added, when she was narrating to me the story, with much humour : "Happily, he did not ask me whether I was indifferent to praise—for that is much more difficult !"

So, then, you should neither consider yourself superior to others and I shall tell you why; you must know that in a being, human or other, it is

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the consciousness that matters and you are either conscious or unconscious : you can consider yourself superior only when you are unconscious; the very moment you are conscious, truly conscious, you lose the sense of superiority or inferiority. In either case you must not feel superior, for it is smallness, pettiness; but you must be full of good will and sympathy and care little about what one says or does not say; however, be always polite, for it is always better to be polite than to be impolite. In that way you put yourself in relation with forces that are more harmonious and you can fight better against the forces of destruction and ugliness. But in reality you must rise above all that and feel yourself interested only in the Divine, in what He expects of you and in what you want to do for Him, for that is the only thing that counts. The rest has no importance.

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