Spiritual life
(Mother to Mona Sarkar:) “Always, at each step and on each occasion, try to feel the Presence, constantly and untiringly. Forget the results of all the actions, and find the lesson they bring for you. Each action has something to teach. Try to find that instead of being overwhelmed by the cause and effect. For each event, know how to stand back a little, detached, and find the clue that it gives for the progress – the Truth behind each action. One should use to the maximum the occasion that arises, without being externally involved. The external has no value. But also to recognise that it is He who is within, – the Truth of your existence, – who is doing everything for you. And evidently it can only be for the best. Leave everything to Him alone, do nothing, and above all, do not worry. Abandon all to Him. Then you will see the difference, how each step, each event, each word, each sensation, each vibration, in fact, each action, each sentiment, becomes the source, the means to perceive what the Truth is. My child, this is a game which is much more interesting than all others.”[1]
- “Sweet Mother, how can someone who hasn’t much spiritual capacity best help in this work?
(Mother:) I don’t know whether one can say that anyone has much or little spiritual capacity. It is not like that.
To live the spiritual life, a reversal of consciousness is needed. This cannot be compared in any way with the different faculties or possibilities one has in the mental field. It may be said of someone that he hasn’t much mental, vital or physical capacity, that his possibilities are very limited; in that case it may be asked how these capacities may be developed, that is, how new ones may be acquired, which is something rather difficult. But to live the spiritual life is to open to another world within oneself. It is to reverse one’s consciousness, as it were. The ordinary human consciousness, even in the most developed, even in men of great talent and great realisation, is a movement turned outwards — all the energies are directed outwards, the whole consciousness is spread outwards; and if anything is turned inwards, it is very little, very rare, very fragmentary, it happens only under the pressure of very special circumstances, violent shocks, the shocks life gives precisely with the intention of slightly reversing this movement of exteriorisation of the consciousness.
But all who have lived a spiritual life have had the same experience: all of a sudden something in their being has been reversed, so to speak, has been turned suddenly and sometimes completely inwards, and also at the same time upwards, from within upwards — but it is not an external “above”, it is within, deep, something other than the heights as they are physically conceived. Something has literally been turned over. There has been a decisive experience and the standpoint in life, the way of looking at life, the attitude one takes in relation to it, has suddenly changed, and in some cases quite definitively, irrevocably.
And as soon as one is turned towards the spiritual life and reality, one touches the Infinite, the Eternal, and there can no longer be any question of a greater or smaller number of capacities or possibilities. It is the mental conception of spiritual life which may say that one has more or less capacity to live spiritually, but this is not at all an adequate statement. What may be said is that one is more or less ready for the decisive and total reversal. In reality, it is the mental capacity to withdraw from ordinary activities and to set out in search of the spiritual life which can be measured.”[2]
(Mother:) “The higher perfection is spiritual and super-human. The lower perfection is human perfection carried to its maximum limits, and this may be quite independent of all spiritual life, all spiritual aspiration. One can be a genius without having any spiritual aspiration. One can have all the most extraordinary moral qualities without having any spiritual life. And even, usually, those who have a very great power of human realisation are satisfied — more or less satisfied — with their condition. They feel they are self-sufficient, that they carry in themselves the source of their realisation and their joy, and it is usually very difficult to make them understand and feel that they are not the creators of their own creations, whatever they may be. Most of them, with very rare exceptions, if they were told, “You are not the originator of this work you are doing, it is a force higher than you and you are only its instrument”, they would dislike it very much — and they will send you about your business!”[3]
(Mother:) “A new religion would not only be useless but very harmful. It is a new life which must be created; it is a new consciousness which must be expressed. This is something beyond intellectual limits and mental formulae. It is a living truth which must manifest.”[4]
- “Sweet Mother, where does our true spiritual life begin?
(Mother:) The true spiritual life begins when one is in communion with the Divine in the psychic, when one is conscious of the divine Presence in the psychic and in constant communion with the psychic. Then the spiritual life begins, not before. The true spiritual life.
When one is united with one’s psychic being and conscious of the divine Presence, and receives the impulses for one’s action from this divine Presence, and when the will has become a conscious collaborator with the divine Will — that is the starting-point.
Before that, one may be an aspirant to the spiritual life, but one doesn’t have a spiritual life.”[5]
- ↑ The Supreme – Conversations with the Mother recollected by Mona Sarkar, p.75
- ↑ Questions and Answers 1957-1958, p.413
- ↑ Ibid., p.92
- ↑ Ibid., p.78
- ↑ Questions and Answers 1956, p.135
See also