Livings Words of the Masters Archives - Page 23 of 34

Heart’s Secluded Shrine

There are muffled throbs of laughter’s undertones,
The murmur of an occult happiness,
An exultation in the depths of sleep,
A heart of bliss within a world of pain.

An Infant nursed on Nature’s covert breast,
An Infant playing in the magic woods,
Fluting to rapture by the spirit’s streams,
Awaits the hour when we shall turn to his call.

In this investiture of fleshly life
A soul that is a spark of God survives
And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen
And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

In our body’s cells there sits a hidden Power
That sees the unseen and plans eternity,
Our smallest parts have room for deepest needs;
There too the golden Messengers can come:
A door is cut in the mud wall of self;
Across the lowly threshold with bowed heads
Angels of ecstasy and self-giving pass,
And lodged in an inner sanctuary of dream
The makers of the image of deity live.

Pity is there and fire-winged sacrifice,
And flashes of sympathy and tenderness
Cast heaven-lights from the heart’s secluded shrine.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 5]

2024-09-19

Constant Contact with the Divine

When we are concentrated in mental movements or intellectual pursuits, why do we sometimes forget or lose touch with the Divine?

You lose it because your consciousness is still divided. The Divine has not settled into your mind; you are not wholly consecrated to the Divine Life. Otherwise you could concentrate to any extent upon such things and still you would have the sense of being helped and supported by the Divine.

In all pursuits, intellectual or active, your one motto should be, “Remember and Offer.” Let whatever you do be done as an offering to the Divine. And this too will be an excellent discipline for you; it will prevent you from doing many foolish and useless things.

Often in the beginning of the action this can be done; but as one gets engrossed in the work, one forgets. How is one to remember?

The condition to be aimed at, the real achievement of Yoga, the final perfection and attainment, for which all else is only a preparation, is a consciousness in which it is impossible to do anything without the Divine; for then, if you are without the Divine, the very source of your action disappears; knowledge, power, all are gone. But so long as you feel that the powers you use are your own, you will not miss the Divine support.

In the beginning of the Yoga you are apt to forget the Divine very often. But by constant aspiration you increase your remembrance and you diminish the forgetfulness. But this should not be done as a severe discipline or a duty; it must be a movement of love and joy. Then very soon a stage will come when, if you do not feel the presence of the Divine at every moment and whatever you are doing, you feel at once lonely and sad and miserable.

Whenever you find that you can do something without feeling the presence of the Divine and yet be perfectly comfortable, you must understand that you are not consecrated in that part of your being. That is the way of the ordinary humanity which does not feel any need of the Divine. But for a seeker of the Divine Life it is very different. And when you have entirely realised unity with the Divine, then, if the Divine were only for a second to withdraw from you, you would simply drop dead; for the Divine is now the Life of your life, your whole existence, your single and complete support. If the Divine is not there, nothing is left.

[The Mother: CWM 3]

2024-09-18

Peace, Peace Upon All the Earth

February 14, 1914

Peace, peace upon all the earth!

May all escape from the ordinary consciousness and be delivered from the attachment for material things; may they awake to the knowledge of Thy divine presence, unite themselves with Thy supreme consciousness and taste the plenitude of peace that springs from it.

Lord, Thou art the sovereign Master of our being. Thy law is our law, and with all our strength we aspire to identify our consciousness with Thy eternal consciousness, that we may accomplish Thy sublime work in each thing and at every moment.

Lord, deliver us from all care for contingencies, deliver us from the ordinary outlook on things. Grant that we may henceforth see only with Thy eyes and act only by Thy will. Transform us into living torches of Thy divine love.

With reverence, with devotion, in a joyful consecration of my whole being I give myself, O Lord, to the fulfilment of Thy law.

Peace, peace upon all the earth!

[Prayers and Meditations of the Mother]

2024-09-18

Mystic Motive Drives the Stars

All is not here a blinded Nature’s task:
A Word, a Wisdom watches us from on high,
A Witness sanctioning her will and works,
An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast;
There is an Influence from a Light above,
There are thoughts remote and sealed eternities;
A mystic motive drives the stars and suns.

In this passage from a deaf unknowing Force
To struggling consciousness and transient breath
A mighty Supernature waits on Time.

The world is other than we now think and see,
Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;
Our minds are starters in the race to God,
Our souls deputed selves of the Supreme.

Across the cosmic field through narrow lanes
Asking a scanty dole from Fortune’s hands
And garbed in beggar’s robes there walks the One.

Even in the theatre of these small lives
Behind the act a secret sweetness breathes,
An urge of miniature divinity.

A mystic passion from the wells of God
Flows through the guarded spaces of the soul;
A force that helps supports the suffering earth,
An unseen nearness and a hidden joy.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 5]

2024-09-18

The Integral Yoga

In the integral Yoga, the integral life down even to the smallest detail has to be transformed, to be divinised. There is nothing here that is insignificant, nothing that is indifferent. You cannot say, “When I am meditating, reading philosophy or listening to these conversations I will be in this condition of an opening towards the Light and call for it, but when I go out to walk or see friends I can allow myself to forget all about it.” To persist in this attitude means that you will remain untransformed and never have the true union; always you will be divided; you will have at best only glimpses of this greater life. For although certain experiences and realisations may come to you in meditation or in your inner consciousness, your body and your outer life will remain unchanged. An inner illumination that does not take any note of the body and the outer life, is of no great use, for it leaves the world as it is. This is what has continually happened till now. Even those who had a very great and powerful realisation withdrew from the world to live undisturbed in inner quiet and peace; the world was left to its ways, and misery and stupidity, Death and Ignorance continued, unaffected, their reign on this material plane of existence. For those who thus withdraw, it may be pleasant to escape from this turmoil, to run away from the difficulty and to find for themselves a happy condition elsewhere; but they leave the world and life uncorrected and untransformed; and their own outer consciousness too they leave unchanged and their bodies as unregenerate as ever. Coming back to the physical world, they are likely to be worse there than even ordinary people; for they have lost the mastery over material things, and their dealing with physical life is likely to be slovenly and helpless in its movements and at the mercy of every passing force.

An ideal of this kind may be good for those who want it, but it is not our Yoga. For we want the divine conquest of this world, the conquest of all its movements and the realisation of the Divine here. But if we want the Divine to reign here we must give all we have and are and do here to the Divine. It will not do to think that anything is unimportant or that the external life and its necessities are no part of the Divine Life. If we do, we shall remain where we have always been and there will be no conquest of the external world; nothing abiding there will have been done.

[The Mother: CWM 3]

2024-09-17

The peace of Thy certitude

February 13, 1914

……How beautiful, grand, simple and calm everything is in the hours when my thought takes its flight to Thee and unites with Thee! And from the day it becomes possible for us to keep this supreme clear-sightedness constantly, with what an airy and yet sure step we shall walk through life above all obstacles and unhesitatingly! For,—this I know through experience—all doubt, all hesitation ceases the very moment one is conscious of Thy law; and if one perceives clearly the extreme relativity of all human action, one knows at the same time, with exactitude and precision, which action is the least relative in regard to one’s body and one’s own way of acting…. and all obstacles really vanish as if by magic. All our efforts, O Lord, will henceforth be bent on an ever more constant realisation of this marvellous state.

May the peace of Thy certitude awaken in every heart!

[Prayers and Meditations of the Mother]

2024-09-17

Toy to amuse the infant earth

These unwise prompters of man’s ignorant heart
And tutors of his stumbling speech and will,
Movers of petty wraths and lusts and hates
And changeful thoughts and shallow emotion’s starts,
These slight illusion-makers with their masks,
Painters of the decor of a dull-hued stage
And nimble scene-shifters of the human play,
Ever are busy with this ill-lit scene.

Ourselves incapable to build our fate
Only as actors speak and strut our parts
Until the piece is done and we pass off
Into a brighter Time and subtler Space.

Thus they inflict their little pigmy law
And curb the mounting slow uprise of man,
Then his too scanty walk with death they close.

This is the ephemeral creature’s daily life.

As long as the human animal is lord
And a dense nether nature screens the soul,
As long as intellect’s outward-gazing sight
Serves earthy interest and creature joys,
An incurable littleness pursues his days.

Ever since consciousness was born on earth,
Life is the same in insect, ape and man,
Its stuff unchanged, its way the common route.

If new designs, if richer details grow
And thought is added and more tangled cares,
If little by little it wears a brighter face,
Still even in man the plot is mean and poor.

A gross content prolongs his fallen state;
His small successes are failures of the soul,
His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:
Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays
For the right to live and his last wages death.

An inertia sunk towards inconscience,
A sleep that imitates death is his repose.

A puny splendour of creative force
Is made his spur to fragile human works
Which yet outlast their brief creator’s breath.

He dreams sometimes of the revels of the gods
And sees the Dionysian gesture pass,—
A leonine greatness that would tear his soul
If through his failing limbs and fainting heart
The sweet and joyful mighty madness swept:
Trivial amusements stimulate and waste
The energy given to him to grow and be.

His little hour is spent in little things…..

Yet was this only a provisional scheme,
A false appearance sketched by limiting sense,
Mind’s insufficient self-discovery,
An early attempt, a first experiment.

This was a toy to amuse the infant earth;
But knowledge ends not in these surface powers
That live upon a ledge in the Ignorance
And dare not look into the dangerous depths
Or to stare upward measuring the Unknown.

There is a deeper seeing from within
And, when we have left these small purlieus of mind,
A greater vision meets us on the heights
In the luminous wideness of the spirit’s gaze.

At last there wakes in us a witness Soul
That looks at truths unseen and scans the Unknown;
Then all assumes a new and marvellous face:
The world quivers with a God-light at its core,
In Time’s deep heart high purposes move and live,
Life’s borders crumble and join infinity.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 5]

2024-09-17

Yoga is effected through offering

Yoga means union with the Divine, and the union is effected through offering—it is founded on the offering of yourself to the Divine. In the beginning you start by making this offering in a general way, as though once for all; you say, “I am the servant of the Divine; my life is given absolutely to the Divine; all my efforts are for the realisation of the Divine Life.” But that is only the first step; for this is not sufficient. When the resolution has been taken, when you have decided that the whole of your life shall be given to the Divine, you have still at every moment to remember it and carry it out in all the details of your existence. You must feel at every step that you belong to the Divine; you must have the constant experience that, in whatever you think or do, it is always the Divine Consciousness that is acting through you. You have no longer anything that you can call your own; you feel everything as coming from the Divine, and you have to offer it back to its source. When you can realise that, then even the smallest thing to which you do not usually pay much attention or care, ceases to be trivial and insignificant; it becomes full of meaning and it opens up a vast horizon beyond.

This is what you have to do to carry out your general offering in detailed offerings. Live constantly in the presence of the Divine; live in the feeling that it is this presence which moves you and is doing everything you do. Offer all your movements to it, not only every mental action, every thought and feeling but even the most ordinary and external actions such as eating; when you eat, you must feel that it is the Divine who is eating through you. When you can thus gather all your movements into the One Life, then you have in you unity instead of division. No longer is one part of your nature given to the Divine, while the rest remains in its ordinary ways, engrossed in ordinary things; your entire life is taken up, an integral transformation is gradually realised in you.

[The Mother: CWM 3]

2024-09-16

The Divine Law and human rules

February 12, 1914

When, conscious with Thy supreme consciousness, one considers all earthly circumstances, one sees their complete relativity and says, “To do this thing or that, after all that is not of much importance; yet a particular mode of action will be the best utilisation of a certain faculty, a certain temperament. All actions, whatever they may be, even the most contradictory in appearance, can be an expression of Thy law to the extent that they are infused with the consciousness of that law, which is not a law of practical application that can be translated into principles or rules in the ordinary human consciousness but a law of attitude, of a constant and prevailing consciousness, something that cannot be expressed in formulas but may be lived.”

But as soon as one falls back into the ordinary consciousness, nothing should be treated lightly and with indifference, the least circumstances, the smallest acts have a great importance and should be seriously considered; for we must try at every moment to do that which will make the identification of our consciousness with the eternal consciousness easy, and avoid carefully all that could be an obstacle to this identification. It is then that the rules of conduct having as their foundation perfect personal disinterestedness should find their full value.

With peace in my heart, with light in my mind, the hope born of certitude in all my being, I greet Thee, O Lord, divine Master of eternal love.

Thou art the reason of our existence and our goal.

[Prayers and Meditations of the Mother]

2024-09-16