Tamas
(Mother to Satprem, 1960:) “So many people are satisfied with their falsehood, their ugliness, their narrowness, all of it. They're quite satisfied. When they're asked to be something else ...
This realm that I'm now investigating, oh! ... I spend whole nights visiting certain places, and there I meet people I know here materially [in the Ashram]. So many are PERFECTLY satisfied with their ... their infirmities, their incapacities, their ugliness, their powerlessness.
And they protest when you want them to change!
Even last night I went down into it ... It was so gray and dull and ... phew! Banal, lifeless. When they are told that, they retort, “No, not at all! Things are quite all right as they are, it's you who is living in a dreamland!”
We'll get out of it one day.
But you cannot get out as long as it all seems quite natural to you. What's most unfortunate is when you resign yourself to it.”[1]
(Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga:) “In the reception of the environing contacts and the reaction to them the three modes determine the temper of the recipient and the character of the response. Inert and inapt, he may suffer them without any responsive reaction, any motion of self-defence or any capacity of assimilation and adjustment; this is the mode of tamas, the way of inertia. The stigmata of tamas are blindness and unconsciousness and incapacity and unintelligence, sloth and indolence and inactivity and mechanical routine and the mind’s torpor and the life’s sleep and the soul’s slumber. Its effect, if uncorrected by other elements, can be nothing but disintegration of the form or the poise of the nature without any new creation or new equilibrium or force of kinetic progress. At the heart of this inert impotence is the principle of ignorance and an inability or slothful unwillingness to comprehend, seize and manage the stimulating or assailing contact, the suggestion of environing forces and their urge towards fresh experience.”[2]
(Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga:) “Tamas obscures and prevents the light of the divine knowledge from penetrating into the dark and dull corners of our nature. Tamas incapacitates and takes away the power to respond to divine impulse and the energy to change and the will to progress and make ourselves plastic to a greater Shakti.”[3]
- ↑ Mother's Agenda 1951-1960, 17 December 1960
- ↑ The Synthesis of Yoga, p.233, “The Three Modes of Nature”
- ↑ Ibid., p.237
See also