Skip to Content

LIFE RESPONSE

If you really relate to Mother, you will find life responding to you. Mother says clearly that the outer life is a reflection of the inner life. Now that should be clear to us because we know that the outer life and inner life are one. Just because our ego draws a boundary between the two does not mean that this represents a real division between what goes on inside us and what goes on in the world around us. The vibration of life that comes towards us does not stop at the boundary we call ourselves. Life vibrations know no boundaries. Life is a universal force. The inside of us and the outside of us are both part of the same field. Sri Aurobindo and Mother have given us a great knowledge, which says that everything around us is a reflection of what we are inside. The natural conclusion is that if we change what is inside us, we can change what comes to us from outside. The Gita says that man can become anything he wants to become. Then you may ask, “If man can become anything he wants, does that mean we are today what we want to be?” That is the fact. We have become what we wanted to become in the past. We possess that power. If we want to accomplish in life, even a firm decision of the mind has the power to make life respond.

Some years ago while we were planning for a conference, a professor had arranged to meet me at 11 o’clock regarding some agricultural proposal. In the midst of my discussion with some colleagues regarding the conference, I kept looking at my watch and seeing the time, thinking the professor would come and interrupt the discussion. By 12 o’clock he had not come and I was wondering where he was. I began to think about it and I saw that I really did not want the professor to come and so he had not come. I thought this is not right of me. I do not know why he is coming and whether it is worthwhile or not, but I do not have a right not to want him to come. It seemed like a wrong attitude on my part. I decided to withdraw the wrong attitude that the professor should not come. When I walked out of my room, I was told he had arrived downstairs. That is life response. Our attitude has power to determine how life responds.

Robert runs a company in Holland. A young man joined his company as a salesman. The young man did not really know much about Mother or even about sales. He went out with one of the other devotees on a sales call. In the store, the owner told him the buyer was not there, so he would have to come back later. He left the store and the devotee asked him why he was leaving. He told her that the buyer was not present in the store. The devotee told him that if he relied on Mother, the store owner would definitely buy something. He should decide that he was going to rely on Mother, take the samples of the products, go back into the store and show them to the owner. He agreed and took all the samples inside the store. The moment he started talking to the owner, the buyer walked into the store. That is life response. Our decision, our will, has power to determine how life responds. When it is backed by faith in Mother, it never fails to respond.

Sri Aurobindo says Spirit has the power to move even Matter. All we want to do is move life. For Mother to move our tiny little life, to improve our circumstances and the results we achieve, is very easy for Her to do, if only we ask Her. Sometimes when we are not even thinking about it or before we even come to know Mother, She does move life. Two weeks before the date set for my wedding, I was in a bookstore in California. I was planning to start medical college in a few months. I stood looking at the books on one of the shelves. Suddenly a book on the very top shelf fell down and landed on my lap. I picked it up and saw it was about Sri Aurobindo. I bought it and that is how I learned about Mother. It was life responding, not to my decision, because I did not have any decision, nor to my mental attitude, but to something in me that was seeking, my aspiration. Suppose someone had brought that book and handed it to me as a gift, that would also be a life response. The principle is the same whether the book comes or information comes about Mother or a gift comes. It is life bringing us what we are seeking.

John, a Canadian devotee, told me that he needed some money to pay off an old partner. This was the last savings he had, so he was hesitant to take that money. He asked me whether he should pay his partner, and I said he definitely should. It was very difficult for him. But he decided to do it. He had kept that money as an investment, and when he inquired about cashing in the investment, he found that it had become 70 percent more than he had been expecting. His willingness to give up his security and do what was right led to the discovery that he had much more money than he thought he had.

If you make the internal organization perfect in business, the market will respond. This is a response of life. If you clean perfectly, money will come. We had a client named Walt who was not even a devotee. On the last day of one of our management conferences, I said to the audience, “If you do not follow any of our advice, at least go back and clean your premises and you will see money comes.” Ten years later Walt attended another conference we were conducting. He stood up and related to the audience how ten years ago he had gone back from our earlier conference, cleaned his offices thoroughly, and received a huge amount of money which he had not been expecting. That shows there is a connection. Why should we only do it now and then?

We do not always feel life is doing what we want. So how can we reverse that and make life do what we want? To create luck in your life means you must acquire the capacity to make life respond to you. Life is not out there. It is inside you. All you need is not out there. What you need is the right attitude to bring things to you. If you use all of your capacities and rely on Mother, customers will come, money will come, whatever you genuinely aspire for will come.

There is a special version of life response in the opposite direction. This is more easily experienced in India. We call it a power cut. When the power goes out, it is a life response. Power means life and energy. When the power goes out, it means the energy is going away. It is a negative response. Life is very sensitive. Power goes out when we have a negative thought, a negative attitude or a negative impulse. Even if you live in America, life is very sensitive but it cannot so easily express through the power supply, because the power system is too well organized. Here you have the advantage of having an immediate indicator, like a red light, telling you when there is a wrong thought you should not have. Over the years we have had endless discussions about this. I remember a time I was working on one of my attitudes. I was sitting in my chair and trying to work very seriously on it and suddenly the lights went out. I felt very discouraged by it and thought, “I am trying to get rid of something and it only makes it worse.” Someone came and said the electricity department was doing repair work and the power would be out for the whole day. I tried to still continue doing my work on myself. After about 20 minutes I felt, ‘yes, at this point I can change my attitude’ and I called Mother very intensely. To my utter amazement, within a second the power came back and remained on the rest of the day. We have heard of dozens of experiences like that.

None of us are 100 percent pure. This is part of our heritage. When we see a negative response from life, we must remember that we have the power to change that response. We do not have to live with it. If we do not try to blame it on someone else, we have the opportunity to make a progress. When the lights go out, we can look inside and find a correspondence. If the lights go out in this room, each of us can look inside himself and find a correspondence in his own life. How can that be? That is the great creative power of Sachchidananda that it can give all of us an experience at the same time that is precisely true for each of us. If any of us is so pure in our emotions, so committed in our consciousness, then at least while we are all together, none of the others will have a bad impulse. We are one. 



book | by Dr. Radut