The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 9

HOW TO BECOME INDIFFERENT TO CRITICISM ?

In one's own consciousness one must look at things from a wider, more general standpoint. If at any moment something holds you, holds you tight and you have to face it, if you are compelled to wrestle with a formidable obstacle and at that time you begin to feel that before this moment thousands and thousands of years passed and after the moment yet more thousands and thousands of years will pass, you immediately see the inconsequence of this little point of time; you need not enter into a high spiritual condition, you have simply to contact Time and Space, with all that is before and all that is after and all that is happening at the time, and if you are not an idiot you say immediately: "Ah, well, I am giving importance to something that has no importance."

Your little moment loses then and there all its mportance if you can visualise simply the immensity of the creation. I am not speaking of rising to spiritual heights, I speak only of the immensity of the creation in time and space and the small

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event on which you are concentrated as if it were of great consequence. All that dissolves immediately if you go about the thing in a sincere spirit. Naturally, there is a part in you that will protest and say, "But for me it has an importance." You have only to leave it aside and go on with the other part of light and consciousness. If you are sincere there, it is not difficult.

There are other procedures. A Chinese sage, I read out to you once, advises you to lie down on the flow of events as on a plank in the ocean, and imagine yourself to be on the vast immensity, drifting upon the waves, contemplating the sky above. In Chinese they call it Wu Wei. When you can do that all trouble disappears.

I knew one Irishman who used to lie on his back and look up to the sky in the night when there were stars. He looked, contemplated on the sky, imagined as if he was floating in this immensity studded with countless luminous points and immediately he felt all his troubles were gone. There are many such ways. What you have to do is to get the sense of relativity, your little person and the importance you attach to things concerning you as against the boundless infinity of the universe. Naturally, there is the other way of separating yourself from the earthly consciousness

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and rising into a higher consciousness, there earthly things take their true place, that is to say, they become small things.

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