Death is not an inevitable thing, it’s an accident which has always happened until now (which at least seems to have always happened until now), and we have taken it into our head to conquer and overcome that accident. But it is such a terrible, such a tremendous battle against all the laws of Nature, all the terrestrial habits, that unless you are a first-class warrior frightened by nothing, it’s better not to start the battle. You have to be an absolutely dauntless hero because, at every step and every second, you have to wage battle against all that is established. So it’s not very easy. And even individually, it’s a battle against yourself, because if you want your physical consciousness to be in a state that will bring about physical immortality you have to be so free of all that the physical consciousness now represents that it’s a battle of every second: all feelings, all sensations, all repulsions, everything that exists and is the fabric of our physical life has to be overcome, transformed and freed from all its habits. It’s every second a battle against thousands and millions of adversaries.
The Mother
There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this “I invite you to the great adventure.”
It is not a question of repeating spiritually what others have done before us, for our adventure begins beyond that. It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails – a real adventure, whose goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored.
Since the beginning of the earth wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of consciousness, I was there.
We must not waste a minute to do our work here because it is here that we can really do it. Do not expect anything from death; life is your salvation. It is in life that the transformation must be achieved; it is on the earth that one progresses, on the earth that one realizes. It is in the body that the Victory is won.
– The Mother
A Passage from Savitri
In Matter shall be lit the spirit’s glow,
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
The days become a happy pilgrim march,
Our will a force of the Eternal’s power,
And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.
The Yoga of the body's cells
There are all kinds of freedom—mental freedom, vital freedom, spiritual freedom—which are the fruits of successive masteries. But a completely new freedom has become possible with the Supramental Manifestation: it is the freedom of the body.
One of the very first results of the supramental manifestation was to give the body a freedom and an autonomy it has never before known. And when I say freedom, I don’t mean some psychological perception or an inner state of consciousness, but something else and far better—it is a new phenomenon in the body, in the cells of the body. For the first time, the cells themselves have felt that they are free, that they have the power to decide. When the new vibrations came and combined with the old ones, I felt it at once and it showed me that a new world was really taking birth.
…But with the supramental manifestation, something new has taken place in the body: it feels it is its own master, autonomous, with its two feet solidly on the ground, as it were. This gives a physical impression of the whole being suddenly drawing itself up, with its head lifted high—I am my own master….
When you are way above in your consciousness, you see things, you know things; but in actual fact, once you descend again into matter, it is like water running through sand. In this respect, things have changed, the body has a DIRECT power, independent of any outer intervention. Even though it is barely visible, I consider this to be a very important result.
And this new vibration in the body has allowed me to understand the mechanism of the transformation. It is not something that comes from a higher Will, not a higher consciousness that imposes itself upon the body: it is the body itself awakening in its cells, a freedom of the cells themselves, an absolutely new vibration that sets disorders right—even disorders that existed prior to the supramental manifestation….
The soul and the psychic being are not exactly the same thing, although their essence is the same.The soul is the divine spark that dwells at the centre of each being; it is identical with its Divine Origin; it is the divine in man. The psychic being is formed progressively around this divine centre, the soul, in the course of its innumerable lives in the terrestrial evolution, until the time comes when the psychic being, fully formed and wholly awakened, becomes the conscious sheath of the soul around which it is formed. And thus identifies with the Divine, it becomes His perfect instrument in the world.
The centre of the human being is the psychic which is the dwelling-place of the immanent Divine. Unification means organisation and harmonisation of all the parts of the being (mental, vital and physical) around this centre, so that all the activities of the being may be the correct expression of the will of the Divine Presence.
Psychic centre: luminous and calm, it is made to govern the human being.
Nothing is permanent in a terrestrial being except the psychic.
What you seek is always there ready for you. Let the psychic turn grow complete and it will of itself bring you to that for which you aspire.
It is not the psychic being that suffers for personal reasons, it is the mind, the vital and the ordinary consciousness of ignorant man. This is because the contact between the outer consciousness and the psychic consciousness is not well established. He in whom the contact has been well established is always happy.
The psychic being works with perseverance and ardour for the union to be made an accomplished fact, but it never complains and knows how to wait for the hour of realisation to come.
It is indispensable that each one finds his psychic and unites with it definitively. It is through the psychic that the supramental will manifest itself.
To find the psychic one must conquer the desires of the vital and silence the mind and then make a sincere submission to the Divine of whom the psychic is the instrument in man.
The inner contact with the psychic is a concrete and undeniable fact which imposes itself on all sincere consciousness.
But the psychic being is the one that will materialize and become the supramental being!
Psychic perfection means to smile at everything.
To do Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga means to seek to transform oneself integrally, to have this single aim in one’s life: that alone exists, nothing else. You feel it in yourself whether you want it or not. If you do not, you can live a life of goodwill, service, understanding; you can work in many other ways. But between that and doing Yoga there is a great difference.
To do Yoga you must want it consciously, you must know first of all what it is,—know what it is and then take the resolution. And once the resolution is taken you must waver no more. When you go to it, you must take it up fully conscious of what you are doing. When you say “I want to do Yoga,” you must know what you are deciding about. That is why when I have spoken to you I have not laid much stress upon this aspect of the thing. I have surely spoken about it and even perhaps a good deal—I am here to speak, and you to listen; but what I mean is that whatever I may have said generally, it is only when individually one comes to me and says that he wants to do Yoga, that I say “yes” (or “no”, if necessary). For such persons things become different, the conditions of life become different, particularly inner things and conditions.
Always there is a Consciousness here and it acts constantly to rectify your position: all the while it puts you in the face of obstacles that prevent you from progressing; it makes you dash your nose against your own errors and blindnesses. But this happens only in the case of those who have decided to do Yoga. For others the Consciousness acts as a light, a knowledge, a force for progress, so that you may reach the maximum of your capacities, develop yourself as far as possible in an atmosphere as favourable as it may be, leaving you, however, completely free to choose.
The decision must come from within. All who come consciously for Yoga, knowing what Yoga is, have to accept conditions of life very different from those that others enjoy—externally perhaps there may not be any difference, but internally there is a wide gulf. There is a kind of absoluteness in the Consciousness that does not allow any deviation from the Path: errors committed become immediately visible with such consequences that one cannot deceive oneself any longer and things take a very serious aspect.
You all, my children, I may tell you,—I have already told you many times and I still repeat, you live in an uncommon freedom. Externally there are a few small restrictions, for, as we are many, and have not the whole earth at our disposal, we have to submit ourselves to some discipline to a certain extent, so that there may not be too much disorder; but internally you live in wonderful liberty, no social restraint, no moral restraint, no intellectual restraint, no fixed principle, nothing is there, save and except a light. If you wish to profit by it, you get the profit; if you do not want, you are free not to profit by it.
But the day you make a choice, and when you do it with all sincerity and you feel within you a radical decision, things become, as I say, quite different. There is the light and there is the way to follow, straight on, one must not turn aside. It deceives none and none can deceive it. Yoga, you must know, is not just a play. When you choose, you must know what you have done. And when you have chosen your way, you must stick to it. You have no more the right to hesitate. You have to go ahead. That is all.
The least, however, that I expect from you is the will to do things well, an effort towards progress, the desire to be in life something better than ordinary humanity. You are brought up, you have grown up under conditions that are unusually luminous, conscious, harmonious, full of goodwill. And in answer to that it is proper that you should be upon earth in some way an expression of that light and harmony and goodwill. That would be something fair.
One can do the Yoga, the Yoga of Transformation—of all things the most difficult—only when one feels that one is here, upon earth, for this alone and has nothing else to do, that this is the sole reason of one’s existence. Even if you have to toil hard, suffer, struggle, it is of no consequence: “This alone and nothing else,”—then it is a different matter. Otherwise I tell you: Be always happy, be always good; be good, meaning, be more understanding, know that you are growing up under exceptional conditions, try to live a life higher, nobler and truer than the ordinary life and let a little of this Consciousness, this light and this benevolence express itself in the world.
It is not for a personal and egoistic aim that you seek perfection, it is for the sake of manifesting the Divine, it is to put all at the service of the Divine. You do not do Yoga with the intention of perfecting yourself personally, for your own sake, but for the divine work that has to be done, for the fulfilment of the Divine Will.
So long as a personal aspiration is there, a personal desire, an egoistic will, it is a mixture, it is not the exact expression of the Divine Will. The only thing that counts is the Divine, His Will, His manifestation, His expression. You are for that, you are that, and nothing else. If there happens to be a feeling of I, of ego, of the individual person, it means that you are not yet what you ought to be. I do not say that the thing can be done forthwith, but that this is the truth of the matter.
For, on this level, on the spiritual level, too many people,—in fact, the majority of those who take up the spiritual life—do Yoga for personal reasons, all kinds of personal reasons : some because they are disgusted with life, others because they are unhappy, some others because they wish to have more knowledge, others again because they want to be spiritually great, yet others because they want to learn things so that they may teach them to others, and so On, there are a thousand personal reasons for doing the Yoga. But there are not many for doing the simple act of giving oneself to the Divine—this act in all its purity and consistency—so that the Divine may take one up and do with One what He wants. With that you go straight to your goal and never run the risk of making a mistake. But all the other motives are mixed up, tainted with ego and they can lead, you hither and thither and far away from the goal.
This feeling that there is for you only one reason for existence, one single motive, the total complete perfect consecration to the Divine, to such a degree that you are unable to distinguish between yourself and the Divine, you become the Divine wholly, absolutely, without any personal reaction whatsoever intervening: this is the ideal attitude. And that is the only one with which you can progress safely in life, protected from everything, protected even from yourself—for of all dangers the greatest is that which comes from one’s own self, one’s egoistic self.
The future of the earth depends on a change of consciousness.
Remain young, never stop striving towards perfection.
A life consecrated to union with the Divine is the only life worth living.
If you go deep enough where all outer things
are as silent as can be, you will find within that flame of which I
often speak, and in that flame you will see your destiny….
You are on the earth at this moment because you have chosen
so in the past….
The complete unification of the whole being around the psychic centre is the essential condition to realise a perfect sincerity.
The best way to hasten the manifestation of the Divine’s Love is to collaborate for the triumph of the Truth.
Sincerity means to lift all the movements of the being to the level of the highest consciousness and realisation already attained.
Sincerity exacts the unification and harmonisation of the whole being in all its parts and movements around the central Divine Will.
When you follow the ascending path, the work is relatively easy. I had already covered this path by the beginning of the century and had established a constant relationship with the Supreme—That which is beyond the Personal and the gods and all the outward expressions of the Divine, but also beyond the Absolute Impersonal. It’s something you cannot describe; you must experience it. And this is what must be brought down into Matter. Such is the descending path, the one I began with Sri Aurobindo; and there, the work is immense.With Sri Aurobindo, we went down below Matter, right into the Subconscient and even into the Inconscient. But after the descent comes the transformation, and when you come down to the body, when you attempt to make it take one step forward—oh, not even a real step, just a little step!—everything starts grating; it’s like stepping on an anthill … And yet the presence, the help of the supreme Mother, is there constantly; thus you realize that for ordinary men such a task is impossible, or else millions of lives would be needed—but in truth, unless the work is done for them and the sadhana of the body done for the entire earth consciousness, they will never achieve the physical transformation, or else it will be so remote that it is better not even to speak of it. But if they open themselves, if they give themselves over in an integral surrender, the work can be done for them—they have only to let it be done.
– The Mother
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
– Savitri
