Meet everyone in The Mother
See everyone as of Her's
Bring all, in the presence spontaneous.
Identify if at all, then through Her
Keep Her in between, whatsoever
Surround all, by the presence spontaneous.
Associate with one and all, thus with Her
As final aim to merge in surrender
Make all, the sole presence spontaneous.
Your Presence the Omnipresence...
Thank you...
December, 2018
To be spontaneous means not to think out, organise, decide and make an effort to realise with the personal will.
I am going to give you two examples to make you understand what true spontaneity is. One--you all know about it undoubtedly--is of the time Sri Aurobindo began writing the Arya** in 1914. It was neither a mental knowledge nor even a mental creation which he transcribed: he silenced his mind and sat at the typewriter, and from above, from the higher planes, all that had to be written came down, all ready, and he had only to move his fingers on the typewriter and it was transcribed. It was in this state of mental silence which allows the knowledge--and even the expression--from above to pass through that he wrote the whole Arya, with its sixty-four printed pages a month. This is why, besides, he could do it, for if it had been a mental work of construction it would have been quite impossible.
That is true mental spontaneity.
...But once one enters the yoga and wants to do yoga, it is very necessary not to be the toy of one's own mental formations. If one wants to rely on one's experiences, one must take great care not to construct within oneself the notion of the experiences one wants to have, the idea one has about them, the form one expects or hopes to see. For, the mental formation, as I already have told you very often, is a real formation, a real creation, and with your idea you create forms which are to a certain extent independent of you and return to you as though from outside and give you the impression of being experiences. But these experiences which are either willed or sought after or expected are not spontaneous experiences and risk being illusions--at times even dangerous illusions.
Therefore, when you follow a mental discipline, you must be particularly careful not to imagine or want to have certain experiences, for in this way you can create for yourself the illusion of these experiences. In the domain of yoga, this very strict and severe spontaneity is absolutely indispensable.
For that, naturally, one must not have any ambition or desire or excessive imagination or what I call "spiritual romanticism", the taste for the miraculous--all this ought to be very carefully eliminated so as to be sure of advancing fearlessly.
Now, after this preliminary explanation, I am going to read to you what I had written and have been asked to comment upon. These aphorisms perhaps call for explanation. I wrote this, inspired perhaps by the reading I was just speaking to you about, but it was more than anything the expression of a personal experience:
"One must be spontaneous in order to be divine."
This is what I have just explained to you. Then the question arises: how to be spontaneous?
"One must be perfectly simple in order to be spontaneous."
And how to be perfectly simple?
"One must be absolutely sincere in order to be perfectly simple."
And now, what does it mean to be absolutely sincere?
"To be absolutely sincere is not to have any division, any contradiction in one's being."
If you are made of pieces which are not only different but often quite contradictory, these pieces necessarily create a division in your being. For example, you have one part in yourself which [new p. 284][old p. 285]aspires for the divine life, to know the Divine, to unite with Him, to live Him integrally, and then you have another part which has attachments, desires--which it calls "needs"--and which not only seeks these things but is quite upset when it does not have them. There are other contradictions, but this one is the most flagrant. There are others, for instance, like wanting to surrender completely to the Divine, to give oneself up totally to His Will and His Guidance, and at the same time, when the experience comes--a common experience on the path when one sincerely tries to give oneself up to the Divine--the feeling that one is nothing, that one can do nothing, that one doesn't even exist outside the Divine; that is to say, if He were not there, one would not exist and could not do anything, one would not be anything at all.... This experience naturally comes as a help on the path of total self-giving, but there is a part of the being which, when the experience comes, rises up in a terrible revolt and says, "But, excuse me! I insist on existing, I insist on being something, I insist on doing things myself, I want to have a personality." And naturally, the second one undoes all that the first had done.
These are not exceptional cases, this happens very frequently. I could give you innumerable examples of such contradictions in the being: when one part tries to take a step forward, the other one comes and demolishes everything. So you have to begin again all the time, and every time it is demolished. That is why you must do this work of sincerity which, when you perceive in your being a part that pulls the other way, makes you take it up carefully, educate it as one educates a child and put it in harmony with the central part. That is the work of sincerity and it is indispensable.
And naturally, when there is a unity, an agreement, a harmony among all the wills of the being, your being can become simple, candid and uniform in its action and tendencies. It is only when the whole being is grouped around a single central movement that you can be spontaneous. For if, within you, [old p. 286]there [new p. 285]is something which is turned towards the Divine and awaits the inspiration and impulse, and at the same time there is another part of the being which seeks its own ends and works to realise its own desires, you no longer know where you stand, and you can no longer be sure of what may happen, for one part can not only undo but totally contradict what the other wants to do.
And surely, to be in harmony with what is said in Wu Wei, after having seen very clearly what is necessary and what ought to be done, it is recommended not to put either violence or too much zest into the realisation of this programme, for an excess of zest is detrimental to the peace and tranquillity and calm necessary for the divine Consciousness to express itself through the individual. And it comes to this:
Balance is indispensable, the path that carefully avoids opposite extremes is indispensable, too much haste is dangerous, impatience prevents you from advancing; and at the same time, inertia puts a drag on your feet.
So for all things, the middle path as the Buddha called it, is the best.
I am going to give you two examples to make you understand what true spontaneity is. One--you all know about it undoubtedly--is of the time Sri Aurobindo began writing the Arya** in 1914. It was neither a mental knowledge nor even a mental creation which he transcribed: he silenced his mind and sat at the typewriter, and from above, from the higher planes, all that had to be written came down, all ready, and he had only to move his fingers on the typewriter and it was transcribed. It was in this state of mental silence which allows the knowledge--and even the expression--from above to pass through that he wrote the whole Arya, with its sixty-four printed pages a month. This is why, besides, he could do it, for if it had been a mental work of construction it would have been quite impossible.
That is true mental spontaneity.
...But once one enters the yoga and wants to do yoga, it is very necessary not to be the toy of one's own mental formations. If one wants to rely on one's experiences, one must take great care not to construct within oneself the notion of the experiences one wants to have, the idea one has about them, the form one expects or hopes to see. For, the mental formation, as I already have told you very often, is a real formation, a real creation, and with your idea you create forms which are to a certain extent independent of you and return to you as though from outside and give you the impression of being experiences. But these experiences which are either willed or sought after or expected are not spontaneous experiences and risk being illusions--at times even dangerous illusions.
Therefore, when you follow a mental discipline, you must be particularly careful not to imagine or want to have certain experiences, for in this way you can create for yourself the illusion of these experiences. In the domain of yoga, this very strict and severe spontaneity is absolutely indispensable.
For that, naturally, one must not have any ambition or desire or excessive imagination or what I call "spiritual romanticism", the taste for the miraculous--all this ought to be very carefully eliminated so as to be sure of advancing fearlessly.
Now, after this preliminary explanation, I am going to read to you what I had written and have been asked to comment upon. These aphorisms perhaps call for explanation. I wrote this, inspired perhaps by the reading I was just speaking to you about, but it was more than anything the expression of a personal experience:
"One must be spontaneous in order to be divine."
This is what I have just explained to you. Then the question arises: how to be spontaneous?
"One must be perfectly simple in order to be spontaneous."
And how to be perfectly simple?
"One must be absolutely sincere in order to be perfectly simple."
And now, what does it mean to be absolutely sincere?
"To be absolutely sincere is not to have any division, any contradiction in one's being."
If you are made of pieces which are not only different but often quite contradictory, these pieces necessarily create a division in your being. For example, you have one part in yourself which [new p. 284][old p. 285]aspires for the divine life, to know the Divine, to unite with Him, to live Him integrally, and then you have another part which has attachments, desires--which it calls "needs"--and which not only seeks these things but is quite upset when it does not have them. There are other contradictions, but this one is the most flagrant. There are others, for instance, like wanting to surrender completely to the Divine, to give oneself up totally to His Will and His Guidance, and at the same time, when the experience comes--a common experience on the path when one sincerely tries to give oneself up to the Divine--the feeling that one is nothing, that one can do nothing, that one doesn't even exist outside the Divine; that is to say, if He were not there, one would not exist and could not do anything, one would not be anything at all.... This experience naturally comes as a help on the path of total self-giving, but there is a part of the being which, when the experience comes, rises up in a terrible revolt and says, "But, excuse me! I insist on existing, I insist on being something, I insist on doing things myself, I want to have a personality." And naturally, the second one undoes all that the first had done.
These are not exceptional cases, this happens very frequently. I could give you innumerable examples of such contradictions in the being: when one part tries to take a step forward, the other one comes and demolishes everything. So you have to begin again all the time, and every time it is demolished. That is why you must do this work of sincerity which, when you perceive in your being a part that pulls the other way, makes you take it up carefully, educate it as one educates a child and put it in harmony with the central part. That is the work of sincerity and it is indispensable.
And naturally, when there is a unity, an agreement, a harmony among all the wills of the being, your being can become simple, candid and uniform in its action and tendencies. It is only when the whole being is grouped around a single central movement that you can be spontaneous. For if, within you, [old p. 286]there [new p. 285]is something which is turned towards the Divine and awaits the inspiration and impulse, and at the same time there is another part of the being which seeks its own ends and works to realise its own desires, you no longer know where you stand, and you can no longer be sure of what may happen, for one part can not only undo but totally contradict what the other wants to do.
And surely, to be in harmony with what is said in Wu Wei, after having seen very clearly what is necessary and what ought to be done, it is recommended not to put either violence or too much zest into the realisation of this programme, for an excess of zest is detrimental to the peace and tranquillity and calm necessary for the divine Consciousness to express itself through the individual. And it comes to this:
Balance is indispensable, the path that carefully avoids opposite extremes is indispensable, too much haste is dangerous, impatience prevents you from advancing; and at the same time, inertia puts a drag on your feet.
So for all things, the middle path as the Buddha called it, is the best.
**It was in the review Arya, within a period of six years (1914-1920), that Sri Aurobindo published most of his major works:
The Life Divine,
The Synthesis of Yoga,
The Human Cycle (originally The Psychology of Social Development),
The Ideal of Human Unity,
Essays on the Gita,
The Secret of the Veda,
The Future Poetry,
The Foundations of Indian Culture (originally a number of series under other titles).**
*Spontaneity
Writings by The Mother
29 August 1956
Flower Name: Celosia argentea (Cristata)
Common cockscomb
Significance: Spontaneous BoldnessCommon cockscomb
One of the results of perfect trust in the Divine
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