Consciousness
- (Shyam Sundar:) “You put something in Your words which enables us to see the Truth that words cannot convey. What is it that accompanies Your words?
(Mother:) Consciousness.”[1]
(Medhananda:) “After millennia when the sky was covered with clouds, one day they parted a moment to reveal a star – the first one. Who is preventing us from experiencing that ecstasy? The little star is still there. The miracle is constant. But man is indifferent.”[2]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote “His anger climbed against me in a stream”, it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the guest-house, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement.”[3]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “To feel quietude, peace, the force working is to be conscious; the unconscious condition comes only by confusion and admitting wrong suggestions and restlessness; if you reject these things, the true consciousness will grow in you. Naturally, the consciousness you have now is nothing to what you will have hereafter when it has grown; but it has to begin in this way and increase by quietude.”[4]
(Mother:) “How to become conscious? That is the problem. By the will – and it is not difficult. It is only a form of application, to do it rigorously and regularly, as you study to learn a language, as you exercise to develop your muscles, or learn to play. In the same way one must apply oneself, one must concentrate, one must work with a constant effort, with a determination to know the whole process of that which is happening within or outside, and how the body, the mental and the vital react. Why does this have a certain effect in you and why not another? How does one react, and why in this manner? What is it that reacts within oneself, who is it that directs, who is it that controls all these phenomena? By which habit does one feel that it is this that has to be done, what will be the best? Which actions will produce these reactions? Who presides, who determines what would be the best for us? What is this consciousness which works to teach us the attitude which changes the perspectives of all our actions?”[5]
- (Shyam Sundar:) “To come down from Your room is to fall into another world, and to go from the Ashram to other towns is to fall into yet another world.
How to construct a bridge between the three?
(Mother:) It is you (like all those who are conscious and consecrated) who are the bridge.”[6]
- (Shyam Sundar:) “How can one keep what You give?
(Mother:) It does not go away but enters the subconscient and continues to act.
To remain conscious of it, one must reduce the range of the subconscient within oneself and thus increase the consciousness.”[7]
(Medhananda:) “With every step in evolution, the universe is becoming more real. It is the light, the quality of consciousness with which we see it that gives it its reality. Space would have no reality at all, if it weren't for the stars; and the more of them there are, the more real it is.”[8]
- ↑ En Route (On the Path): The Mother's Correspondence with Shyam Sundar, p.30
- ↑ On the threshold of a new age with Medhananda, p.48
- ↑ Letters on Poetry and Art, p.316
- ↑ Letters on Yoga – I, p.100
- ↑ Blessings of the Grace: Conversations with the Mother Recollected by Mona Sarkar and Some of Her Written Answers, p.148
- ↑ En Route (On the Path): The Mother's Correspondence with Shyam Sundar, p.21
- ↑ Ibid., p.51
- ↑ On the threshold of a new age with Medhananda, p.34
See also