Livings Words of the Masters Archives - Page 24 of 34

The secret inner commerce

Our conscious movements have sealed origins
But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;
No understanding binds our comrade parts;
Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.

Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves;
Even our body is a mystery shop;
As our earth’s roots lurk screened below our earth,
So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.

Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;
Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.

In the subterranean reaches of the spirit
A puissance acts and recks not what it means;
Using unthinking monitors and scribes,
It is the cause of what we think and feel.

The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind,
Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters
Only of their small task’s routine aware
And busy with the record in our cells,
Concealed in the subliminal secrecies
Mid an obscure occult machinery,
Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt
Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.

A whisper falls into life’s inner ear
And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,
Speech leaps, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will
Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.

Our lives translate these subtle intimacies;
All is the commerce of a secret Power….

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.

[Savitri: Book 2 Canto 5]

2024-09-16

Meditation and spiritual progress

The number of hours spent in meditation is no proof of spiritual progress. It is a proof of your progress when you no longer have to make an effort to meditate. Then you have rather to make an effort to stop meditating: it becomes difficult to stop meditation, difficult to stop thinking of the Divine, difficult to come down to the ordinary consciousness. Then you are sure of progress, then you have made real progress when concentration in the Divine is the necessity of your life, when you cannot do without it, when it continues naturally from morning to night whatever you may be engaged in doing. Whether you sit down to meditation or go about and do things and work, what is required of you is consciousness; that is the one need,—to be constantly conscious of the Divine.

But is not sitting down to meditation an indispensable discipline, and does it not give a more intense and concentrated union with the Divine?

That may be. But a discipline in itself is not what we are seeking. What we are seeking is to be concentrated on the Divine in all that we do, at all times, in all our acts and in every movement. There are some here who have been told to meditate; but also there are others who have not been asked to do any meditation at all. But it must not be thought that they are not progressing. They too follow a discipline, but it is of another nature. To work, to act with devotion and an inner consecration is also a spiritual discipline. The final aim is to be in constant union with the Divine, not only in meditation but in all circumstances and in all the active life.

There are some who, when they are sitting in meditation, get into a state which they think very fine and delightful. They sit self-complacent in it and forget the world; but if they are disturbed, they come out of it angry and restless, because their meditation was interrupted. This is not a sign of spiritual progress or discipline. There are some people who act and seem to feel as if their meditation were a debt they have to pay to the Divine; they are like men who go to church once a week and think they have paid what they owe to God.

If you need to make an effort to go into meditation, you are still very far from being able to live the spiritual life. When it takes an effort to come out of it, then indeed your meditation can be an indication that you are in the spiritual life.

There are disciplines such as Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga that one can practise and yet have nothing to do with the spiritual life; the former arrives mostly at body control, the latter at mind control. But to enter the spiritual life means to take a plunge into the Divine, as you would jump into the sea. And that is not the end but the very beginning; for after you have taken the plunge, you must learn to live in the Divine. How are you to do it? You have simply to jump straight in and not to think, “Where shall I fall? What will happen to me?” It is the hesitation of your mind that prevents you. You must simply let yourself go. If you wish to dive into the sea and are thinking all the time, “Ah, but there may be a stone here or a stone there”, you cannot dive.

[CWM 03]

2024-09-15

The only thing we must avoid

February 9, 1914

Whatever names may be given to Thee, O Lord, by the élite of humanity, athirst for something absolute, it seeks ardently for Thee. Even those who seem to move farthest away from Thee, even those who are exclusively occupied with themselves, are they not searching for an absolute in sensation, an absolute in satisfaction, and in spite of its vanity that search also can some day lead to Thee; Thou art far too much at the core, at the heart of all things for even the very worst egoisms not to be transformed by Thee into aspirations…. The only thing we must fear and avoid is the inertia of inconscience, of blind and heavy ignorance. That state lies at the very bottom of the infinite ladder that rises towards Thee. And all Thy effort consists in pulling Matter out of this primeval darkness so as to awaken it to consciousness. Even passion is preferable to inconscience. We must therefore go constantly forward to conquer that universal bedrock of inconscience and through our own organism transform it gradually into luminous consciousness.

O Lord, sweet Master of love, Thou whom I see so living, so conscious within all things, I adore Thee with a boundless devotion.

[Prayers and Meditations of the Mother]

2024-09-15

The little self

Beings were there who wore a human form;
Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene,
But knew not who they were or why they lived:
Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,
Life had for them no aim save Nature’s joy
And the stimulus and delight of outer things;
Identified with the spirit’s outward shell,
They worked for the body’s wants, they craved no more.

The veiled spectator watching from their depths
Fixed not his inward eye upon himself
Nor turned to find the author of the plot,
He saw the drama only and the stage.

There was no brooding stress of deeper sense,
The burden of reflection was not borne:
Mind looked on Nature with unknowing eyes,
Adored her boons and feared her monstrous strokes.

It pondered not on the magic of her laws,
It thirsted not for the secret wells of Truth,
But made a register of crowding facts
And strung sensations on a vivid thread:
It hunted and it fled and sniffed the winds,
Or slothed inert in sunshine and soft air:
It sought the engrossing contacts of the world,
But only to feed the surface sense with bliss.

These felt life’s quiver in the outward touch,
They could not feel behind the touch the soul.

To guard their form of self from Nature’s harm,
To enjoy and to survive was all their care.

[Savitri: Book Two Canto 4]

2024-09-15

Surrender of the will

You have a will and you can offer that will. Take the example of becoming conscious of your nights. If you take the attitude of passive surrender, you would say, “When it is the Divine Will that I should become conscious, then I shall become conscious.” On the other hand, if you offer your will to the Divine, you begin to will, you say, “I will become conscious of my nights.” You have the will that it should be done; you do not sit down idle and wait. The surrender comes in when you take the attitude that says, “I give my will to the Divine. I intensely want to become conscious of my nights, I have not the knowledge, let the Divine Will work it out for me.” Your will must continue to act steadily, not in the way of choosing a particular action or demanding a particular object, but as an ardent aspiration concentrated upon the end to be achieved. This is the first step. If you are vigilant, if your attention is alert, you will certainly receive something in the form of an inspiration of what is to be done and that you must forthwith proceed to do. Only, you must remember that to surrender is to accept whatever is the result of your action, though the result may be quite different from what you expect. On the other hand, if your surrender is passive, you will do nothing and try nothing; you will simply go to sleep and wait for a miracle.

Now to know whether your will or desire is in agreement with the Divine Will or not, you must look and see whether you have an answer or have no answer, whether you feel supported or contradicted, not by the mind or the vital or the body, but by that something which is always there deep in the inner being, in your heart.

[The Mother: CWM 3]

2024-09-14

Thy Law may be fulfilled

February 8, 1914

O Lord, sweet Master of love, Thou who bringest us out of the darkness to awaken us to consciousness, who deliverest us from suffering to make us commune within Thy eternal peace, every morning my aspiration soars ardently towards Thee, and I implore that my being, integrally awake to Thy knowledge, may now live only by Thee, in Thee, for Thee; I implore that more and more perfectly identified with Thee, I may now be only Thyself manifested in word and act; I implore that all those who come to us, all who are in contact with us, may awaken to the full knowledge of Thy divine presence, Thy sovereign law, and let themselves be definitively transformed by it; I implore that all men upon earth, in spite of their bitter suffering, may feel dawning in it the sublime consolation of Thy light and love, and the marvellous comfort of Thy peace; I implore that every substance impregnated more and more by Thy sovereign forces may put up an ever-diminishing resistance of blind ignorance against Thee, and that triumphing over all darkness Thou mayst transfigure definitively and integrally this universe of strife and anguish into a universe of harmony and peace….

So that Thy law may be fulfilled.

[Prayers and Meditations of the Mother]

2024-09-14

The glory of life

Heaven’s joys might have been earth’s if earth were pure.

There could have reached our divinised sense and heart
Some natural felicity’s bright extreme,
Some thrill of Supernature’s absolutes:
All strengths could laugh and sport on earth’s hard roads
And never feel her cruel edge of pain,
All love could play and nowhere Nature’s shame.

But she has stabled her dreams in Matter’s courts
And still her doors are barred to things supreme….

Only to be was a supreme delight,
Life was a happy laughter of the soul
And Joy was king with Love for minister.

The spirit’s luminousness was bodied there.

Life’s contraries were lovers or natural friends
And her extremes keen edges of harmony:
Indulgence with a tender purity came
And nursed the god on her maternal breast:
There none was weak, so falsehood could not live;
Ignorance was a thin shade protecting light,
Imagination the free-will of Truth,
Pleasure a candidate for heaven’s fire;
The intellect was Beauty’s worshipper,
Strength was the slave of calm spiritual law,
Power laid its head upon the breasts of Bliss….

All was a game of meeting kinglinesses.

For worship lifts the worshipper’s bowed strength
Close to the god’s pride and bliss his soul adores:
The ruler there is one with all he rules;
To him who serves with a free equal heart
Obedience is his princely training’s school,
His nobility’s coronet and privilege,
His faith is a high nature’s idiom,
His service a spiritual sovereignty.

[Savitri: Book 2 Canto 3]

2024-09-14

The heart is a much truer reality

Whatever difference there is between the West and the East in relation to spiritual life lies not in the inner being or nature, which is an invariable and constant thing, but in the mental habits, in the modes of outer expression and presentation which are the result of education and environment and other external conditions. All people, whether occidental or oriental, are alike in their deepest feelings; they are different in their way of thinking. Sincerity, for example, is a quality which is the same everywhere. Those who are sincere, to whichever nation they belong, are all sincere in the same way. Only the forms given to this sincerity vary. The mind works in different ways in different peoples, but the heart is the same everywhere; the heart is a much truer reality, and the differences belong to the superficial parts. As soon as you go deep enough, you meet something that is one in all. All meet in the Divine. The sun is the symbol of the Divine in the physical nature. Clouds may modify its appearance, but when they are no longer there, you see it is the same sun always and everywhere.

If you cannot feel one with somebody, it means you have not gone deep enough in your feelings.

[The Mother: CWM 3]

2024-09-13

Making rules for oneself

February 7, 1914

For him who, by being integrally united with Thee, is constantly conscious of what expresses Thee most perfectly in action considering the circumstances, no external rule is any longer necessary. The principles of life are in sum only makeshifts for diminishing as far as possible the ignorance of those who do not know Thee yet, and for counteracting somehow or other the moments of blindness and obscurity of those who have only an intermittent contact with Thee.

To make rules for oneself and to make them as general, that is, as supple as possible, is good, but provided one considers them only as artificial lights which should not be used except when the full natural light of communion with Thee fails. Besides, a constant revision of these rules is imperative, for they can be only the expression of a present knowledge and must necessarily gain by all growth and improvement of knowledge.

That is why when meditating upon the attitude one should have towards all those who come to us, in order not only to refrain from doing them any harm but, above all, to strive to do them the utmost possible good—that is, to help them as best one can in making the supreme discovery, the discovery of Thee within them—I saw clearly that no rule was vast and supple enough to be perfectly adapted to Thy law, and that the only true solution was to be always in communion with Thee, so that it could be adapted perfectly to all the infinite variety of circumstances.

[Prayers and Meditations of the Mother]

2024-09-13