TALK TO A NEW SADHAK
08-08-1973
In coming to Mother, there are a number of ways that people come here. Before telling you what is to be done, let me make it clear that your coming here on examination is a mental quest, and our trying to find out What should be done is again a mental quest. At the end of the search, the fact that I am trying to explain things to you, or your trying to understand something --- if this approach goes, that is the gain, that is the benefit. Because if you say at the end of half-an-hour's talk of mine that you understand, if you approve -- what are you going to do? You are going to follow your understanding. For that crime of yours, I am a party. When you are following your own understanding, where does Mother come into your picture or my picture? You are anxious to understand. I am anxious to explain. Both are, let me say, not wrong approaches but partial approaches. When this is given up happily, your coming to Mother begins. Till then, you are staying in your understanding. I am relating to you to the extent that I can explain things to you. That is --- there is no relationship between me and you. If there is no relationship between you and me, where is the question of a relationship between both of us towards Mother? Well, anyway, we have to begin where we are.
If you start philosophically, you have to close your eyes and sit in meditation under the impression that there is silent communication, which means that there is a silent boredom. We shall begin from the point of view that you need an understanding. But let me not say that I need to explain anything to anybody. My purpose in explaining things to you is clearly that today, the only way in which I can best relate myself to you is through an explanation. As long as you don't need an explanation, I stop explaining.
Coming to Mother means (without going into the theoretical explanation of what Mother is and why one should come to Her) let me ask myself what is Mother to you? As I understand, Mother's Centre is, to you, a place where you found vibrations of love, descent of peace, the compassion of Mother. These are not concepts which either the books or the people here explain to you. That is the centre for you. These are vibrations which you feel in your very nerves. You have had occasions to experience this. The experience of joy, the experience of love, is the Centre for you. The Centre has in it this segment of giving experiences of joy to people. But it is a very limited way of approaching the Centre. But, as I said earlier, here also let us relate ourselves to Mother; for the present let us inform ourselves, tell ourselves that this is only one small fragment of Mother. As a matter of fact, here the Centre means not a physical building, not even the presence of the Mother, it is the force, the emanation that she has put into this place, the emanation that she puts into everyone who sees her, accepts her, who responds to her or in whom she evokes a response. That emanation is more effective, or more easily in function in this place, in this atmosphere. That is of an infinite dimension. It is not in time, it is not in space, it is not in limitation. It is that place to which you have come, which to you has revealed itself as a vibration of love, vibrations of joy, great descents of peace. Rationally, though, I am not enamoured of being rational (to be rational is not a sin) rationally, this one single link of yours, this one single bond of yours towards this atmosphere must expand and make you see all that by which the word Mother goes. The entire universe this vibration of Mother contains must be revealed to you.
Mother does not say that one should keep quiet and allow the Divine to take possession of him or her. The yoga itself is a conscious effort to abridge nature's evolution. So, in each person there must be a conscious, constant intense effort of opening oneself, relating oneself to this atmosphere and allowing that atmosphere to grow within. This vibration often gets personified into department, in a type of work, in a person or group of persons. Ultimately, this vibration comes and touches us and one part of our personality responds to that, happily in an expansive way. Ultimately it is that part in us, which we may call the better part in us, the light part in us which is Mother to us. A person may be Mother to us, Mother Herself is Mother to us, but there are different gradations in which one relates what is oneself with Mother. How does a person relate himself to Mother? Each person, each sadhak, each visitor must have a need for this relationship, must yearn for this relationship. If there is no need, he will be thinking of something else at Mother's Center. In your case, that question doesn't arise. But another question arises. What question does not arise, in your case, is that there is a felt need to relate yourself to Mother, to grow as Mother's child. This is done by a number of ways. The known ways are: consecration, surrender, conscious expression of consciousness. Each time there is a felt need, instead of asking oneself to fulfill that need, instead of addressing oneself to the task on hand and having belief in oneself, that he can supply that need, --- say suppose you want to buy a book. We have faith in our capacity to choose a book, to go to a bookstore and chose a book. Instead of having faith in our capacity, to chose a book, we put our faith in Mother and pray to her that we may be in a position to buy the book.
That is a way in which, through the act, we relate ourselves to Mother. In consecration it is a higher stage. Prayer comes out of a stage of helplessness. Prayer comes out of a stage of unawareness. Awareness comes only in the moment of difficulty. A man who prays is aware of that pin-point of time aware of his urgent need, aware of stress. Consecration is wider. Consecration implies a wider knowledge. It implies that a work will be done by the Divine. The faith in the Divine is wider; starts before the present, and ends after the present. We do not care for the result. We put the entire result in the hands of the Divine, we put the entire work in the hands of the Divine because we have the faith, a wider and deeper faith in the Divine and the result the Divine brings us is satisfactory to us. But it is still an attitude. It is still a mental act. It can still originate in the mind. Surrender is a much wider stage. It is a state of consciousness. It is a permanent state of attitudes. One cannot refer to oneself because there is no central reference. All is surrendered to the Divine. When a work presents, one finds in oneself only surrender. One has no will to exercise, one has no preferences to ask for, one has no motions to make. In that consciousness and poise, the Divine Will begins to enter, begins to act in the person, making the person an instrument. That itself is a very high estate and that is called the beginning of Integral Yoga. But there is a higher state. That is what I would prefer to call Conscious Receptivity of the Higher Consciousness for a particular work which the Divine has given us and a conscious expression of that received consciousness in the field of work through the established grooves of human nature as it is formed in us with a view to fulfilling the Divine Will, that is, with a view to dissolving those grooves and making them non-existent.
It is this conscious receptivity of a particular work, conscious receptivity of a certain vibration of consciousness for a particular work and a conscious expression of it in the field of work that is being attempted in our farm. For that, even in a surrendered state, there must be an awareness, there must be a leadership, there must be a spearheading --- only it should not be the awareness of the human ego, of the human will. In the surrendered state the human will is non-existent. In a conscious expression stage, one is aware of the Divine Will. One is able to identify oneself actively with the Divine Will, anticipates its purposes. One becomes the Divine Will, sees the field as a moment of manifestation, sees the field as an opportunity for growth which is the second or third rule in the psychic education which Mother speaks of; invokes the Divine Will because he himself is the Divine Will, invokes the Divine Will more actively than the human instrument would allow, even the surrendered state of the human instrument would allow; actively harnesses it, expresses it in the field in such a way that the channel of human nature in the individual begin to crack, to disappear. He becomes, not a human instrument, he becomes a Divine instrument. In doing this, the prayer is for the individual. In prayer, the result is for the individual. I pray that I could buy a book. I want the book for myself, but my reliance is placed on the Divine. In consecration I do not ask for the book. I want to buy the book, I consecrate the whole act to the Divine, whether it is purchased or not is immaterial, but I look to the Divine as a source of my progress. My looking to the Divine as a source of my progress is the human way of relating to the Divine.
As I look at myself as an occasion for the manifestation of the Divine in the world, it is the Divine way of looking at me, and that is the stage to which, beyond surrender, this conscious expression of Divine consciousness takes us. Well, all this, how am I to know? In my daily work? Or my toilet is overflowing or today I have not locked the door. What shall I do? In daily work, if a person is to be conscious, if a person is to make maximum possible progress he must take the better part in himself as the Mother before the central reference in him is developed and relate himself to that better part. In the light of the better part, if you look at the work, the better part will act, it will receive the higher consciousness and do the work. When the work goes wrong you will see that the other part just restrains the better part. What progress each person has to make is to relieve the better part from the lower part. It may be very simple. Well, I will give you an example. The doctor says I should eat oranges. It is true that I should take care of my body because it is not my body, it is the Divine body. For the Divine to manifest in my body, I have to give oranges to it according to the instructions of the doctor. But I like eating oranges, and when the doctor has said so, I thank the doctor and, incidentally, The Divine, for having advised me to buy oranges. It is an occasion for me to enjoy oranges in fulfilling the instructions of the doctor. One should not become austere. One need not become self-denying. But that is the one point. Where your palate exercises, what you must be aware of, that is all the one part you can have a hold on. The rest is not in your hands. You can enjoy the palate, but not for yourself, because the palate is a Divine faculty. It has to be allowed to grow by the constant exercise. But the palate has got two parts. One is its being a faculty, the other is its expression of self-appropriation. At some point there is dissipation, at some point there is indulgence. Through the fruit you come to the palate, through the palate you go to the roots of the ego.
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