the Divine Grace

0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
help of the Divine Grace? Yet you know from experience that
the result is unfailing and marvellous!
--
obtained the intervention of the Divine Grace. This prompted
Attila to alter the route of his troops, and so he gave the city a

0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Certainly the Divine Grace is always at work, it is the material
world and the men living there that do not want it!
--
Have faith in the Divine Grace and the hour of liberation will
be hastened.
--
calm confidence, have faith in the Divine Grace, and you will
overcome all your difficulties.
--
overcome and replaced by a complete trust in the Divine Grace.
For several days there has been pain in the nape of the

0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What does this mean? Doesn't the Divine Grace always
pour down on us, depending only on our receptivity?
--
To receive the Divine Grace, not only must one have a great
aspiration, but also a sincere humility and an absolute trust.

01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. the Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of manone level or mode of his being and consciousness purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity.
The conception of original sin is a cardinal factor in Christian discipline. The conception, of sinfulness is the very motive-power that drives the aspirant. "Seek tensely," it is said, "sorrow and sigh deep, mourn still, and stoop low till thine eye water for anguish and for pain." Remorse and grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier temperaments, like the present one, for example, who show an unusual balance, a sturdy common sense even in the midst of their darkest nights, who have chalked out as much of the sunlit path as is possible in this line. Thus this old-world mystic says: it is true one must see and admit one's sinfulness, the grosser and apparent and more violent ones as well as all the subtle varieties of it that are in you or rise up in you or come from the Enemy. They pursue you till the very end of your journey. Still you need not feel overwhelmed or completely desperate. Once you recognise the sin in you, even the bare fact of recognition means for you half the victory. The mystic says, "It is no sin as thou feelest them." The day Jesus gave himself away on the Cross, since that very day you are free, potentially free from the bondage of sin. Once you give your adherence to Him, the Enemies are rendered powerless. "They tease the soul, but they harm not the soul". Or again, as the mystic graphically phrases it: "This soul is not borne in this image of sin as a sick man, though he feel it; but he beareth it." The best way of dealing with one's enemies is not to struggle and "strive with them." The aspirant, the lover of Jesus, must remember: "He is through grace reformed to the likeness of God ('in the privy substance of his soul within') though he neither feel it nor see it."

0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
being, without reserve, to the Divine Grace, and you will feel
the felicity for which you aspire.
--
one of Your prayers and then invoke the Divine Grace
in silence, each in his own way, for the departed person,
--
good and is done by the Divine Grace." Is it good, is it
healthy to think like this?
--
Sri Aurobindo has said somewhere that if we surrender to the Divine Grace, it will do everything for us.
Then what is the value of tapasya?
--
But the Divine Grace is infinite!
20 July 1966
--
Aurobindo speaks of the influence of the Divine Compassion and the Divine Grace.32 But what is the difference between the two?
The compassion seeks to relieve the suffering of all, whether
--
giving them their chance; (3) the Divine Grace which acts more incalculably but also
more irresistibly than the others." - Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 23, p. 609.
--
Divine work and unshakable trust in the Divine Grace. All
this must be accompanied by a sustained, ardent, persevering

01.12 - Goethe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Satan proposes to lead man down into hell through a sure means, nothing more sure, according to him, viz., love for a woman and a woman's love in return. Nothing like that to make man earth-bound or hell-bound and force out of him the nostalgic cry, "Time must have a stop." A most simple, primal and primeval lyric love will most suit Satan's purpose. Hence the Margaret episode. Love=Passion=Lust=Hell; that is the inevitable equation sequence, and through which runs the magic thread of infatuation. And that charm is invincible. Satan did succeed and was within an ace, as they say, of the final and definitive triumph: but that was not to be, for he left out of account an incalculable element. Love, even human love has, at least can have, a wonderful power, the potency of reversing the natural decree and bring about a supernatural intervention. Human love can at a crucial momentin extremiscall down the Divine Grace, which means God's love for man. And the soul meant for perdition and about to be seized and carried away by Satan finds itself suddenly free and lifted up and borne by Heaven's messengers. Human Jove is divine love itself in earthly form and figure and whatever its apparent aberrations it is in soul and substance that thing. Satan is hoisted with his own petard. That is God's irony.
But Goethe's Satan seems to know or feel something of his fate. He knows his function and the limit too of his function. He speaks of the doomsday for people, but it is his doomsday also, he says in mystic terms. Yes, it is his doomsday, for it is the day of man's liberation. Satan has to release man from the pact that stands cancelled. The soul of man cannot be sold, even if he wanted it.

01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But Thompson was not an intellectual, his doubts and despondencies were not of the mental order, he was a boiling, swelling life-surge, a geyser, a volcano. He, too, crossed the Night and saw the light of Day, but in a different way. Well, I he did not march into the day, it was the Day that marched I into him! Yes, the Divine Grace came and seized him from behind with violence. A modern, a modernist consciousness cannot expect that indulgence. God meets him only halfway, he has to work up himself the other half. He has laid so many demands and conditions: the knots in his case are not cut asunder but slowly disengaged.
The modern temper is especially partial to harmony: it cannot assert and reject unilaterally and categorically, it wishes to go round an object and view all its sides; it asks for a synthesis and reconciliation of differences and contraries. Two major chords of life-experience that demand accord are Life and Death, Time and Eternity. Indeed, the problem of Time hangs heavy on the human consciousness. It has touched to the quick philosophers and sages in all ages and climes; it is the great question that confronts the spiritual seeker, the riddle that the Sphinx of life puts to the journeying soul for solution.

0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
sadhak and its result depend on the Divine Grace.
About this, one could say humorously that we are all divine, but

0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is by perfecting our faith in the Divine Grace that we shall
be able to conquer the defeatism of the subconscient.

0 1956-04-04, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I am broken and battered in the depths of my being as I was in my flesh in the concentration camps. Will the Divine Grace take pity on me? Can you, do you want to help me? Alone I can do nothing. I am in an absolute solitude, even beyond all rebellion, at my very end.
Yet I love you in spite of all that I am.

0 1958-05-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
No. From the minute it is conscious, it is conscious of its own falsehood! It is conscious of this law, of that law, of this third law that fourth law, this tenth laweverything is a law. We are subject to physical laws: this will produce such and such a result if you do that, this will happen, etc. Oh! It reeks! I know it well. I know it very well. These laws reek of falsehood. In the body, we have no faith in the Divine Grace, none, none, none, none! Those who have not undergone a tapasya2 as I have, say, Yes, all these inner moral things, feelings, psychology, all that is very good; we want the Divine and we are ready to But all the same, material facts are material facts, they have their concrete reality, after all an illness is an illness, food is food, and everything you do has a consequence, and when you are bah, bah, bah, bah, bah!
We must understand that this isnt trueit isnt true, its a falsehood, all this is sheer falsehood. It is NOT TRUE, it is not true!

0 1960-10-25, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And even if at the moment you dont feel very good, you are able to say, It doesnt matter; what we have to do, well do (this fear of not being able to do what has to be done is the most irksome), if at that moment you can sincerely say to yourself, No, I trust in the Divine Grace no, I will do what I have to do, and Ill be given the power to do it, or the power to do it will be created in me then that is the true attitude.
I feel thats what you give me.

0 1961-06-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When one does not repeat ones past mistakes, the divine power, the power of the Divine Grace, abolishes their consequences their karmain the being. But as long as mistakes are repeated nothing can be abolished, because one re-creates them at every minute. When a person has made a serious error, say, a serious mistake (it can be serious or not, but we are concerned primarily with the serious ones), such mistakes have their consequences in life, a karma which has to be exhausted. the Divine Grace, if you call upon it, has the power to abolish that karma, to cut short the consequences but the Grace can only do this when you, within yourself, dont begin all over again, when the mistake committed is not renewed. The past can be completely purified and abolished, on condition that one does not keep making it into a perpetual present.
I have said it there in one sentence, but I didnt want people to believe that they can continue making the same stupid blunder indefinitely and have the Grace indefinitely annul all the consequences.1 It isnt like that! The past can be cleansed to the point where it has no effect of any kind on the future, but only on condition that you stop the wrong vibration in yourself, that you dont reproduce the same vibration indefinitely.

0 1964-03-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So the people, the faithful, who always say, Through the Divine Grace this has happened, arent so wrong.
I only note the fact that it is this Vibration of Order and Harmony that intervened (were not concerned with the reasons for its intervention, this is only a scientific observation), and of this Ive had a fairly large number of experiences.

0 1964-08-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We know nothing, we know nothing, nothing. All the rules Naturally, the inner experience and the inside are very fine, theres no question. But that sort of tension every minute in your every movement You know, to do EXACTLY what should be done, to say exactly what should be said the exact thing in every movement You must pay attention to everything, be tensed for everything: its a constant, constant tension. Or if you take the other attitude, trust the Divine Grace and let the Lord take care of everything, isnt there a risk that it will end in the bodys disintegration? Rationally I know, but its the body that should know!
When there is someone who has made the experiment and naturally has Wisdom, its so simple! Before, whenever there was the slightest difficulty, I didnt even need to say anything to Sri Aurobindo, everything would sort itself out. Now, I am the one who is doing the work, I have no one to turn to, no one has done it! So this, too, makes for a sort of tension.

0 1965-02-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh, if you want to be amused, I have received a letter from Alexandra David-Neel. You know that we had been corresponding and that she was the great protector of Tibetan lames (one of them was her son and he died there, so she was feeling quite lonely). I told her that we had been put in contact with all those Tibetans2 and I suggested she might take another one with her (because she had written to me about this). And I added that they would certainly be very glad to serve her in gratitude for the great intellectual progress they would be making with hershe never forgave me! Never forgave me. Because I wrote intellectual instead of spiritual (I consider she is quite incapable of making anyone progress spiritually, while intellectually, she is first-rate). And since that time, no more letters, nothing. The other day, I got a letter in which she writes (Mother imitates the supercilious tone of the letter), Dear friend of the past, I have heard about the attack on the Ashram (you should have read the letter, it was marvelous!), and I hope that nothing untoward has happened to you. But now that the Ashrams invulnerability has been destroyed, attacks may recur, so I presume you will leave Pondicherry.3 (Mother laughs) I simply answered her, Dear friend of always (laughing), do not worry, all is well. Above the forces of destruction, there is the Divine Grace, which protects and mends, and I simply put, Yours very affectionately. And I enclosed in the letter the message4 of the 21st.
That woman is eating herself away. Every time I had the opportunity, I spoke to her about Buddhas love; I told her, But Buddha was full of love! And that makes her blood boil!

0 1966-11-19, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yet, of all factors, mental arrogance is the most unfavorable to the action of the Divine Grace.
This notation, you know, was purely and simply a question of vibration; it was the vibration of mental arrogance (which is perceptible, clear, absolutely clear). It came and took up the whole space (Mother makes a gesture of puffing up), it took up a lot of space! It took up the whole space, and then, this very tranquil, very calm Action, so noiseless, without ado, unassuming; it goes like this (gesture of imperturbable descent), with perfect simplicity and it was absolutely blocked, it couldnt get through! So I wrote this note.
--
The most unfavorable to the action of the Divine Grace.4
***
--
"...Of all factors, mental arrogance is the most unfavorable to the action of the Divine Grace." Some words express a vibration perfectly. That's yet another experience: there is the word translating the vibration perfectly, and the others giving a hazy and uncertain effect. Some words fit perfectly together: "Unfavorable to the action of the Divine Grace..."
Satprem thought of en cachette for "unseen" (literally, "on the sly" or "stealthily").

0 1966-12-07, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"There are these three powers [governing life on earth]: (1) The Cosmic Law, of Karma or what else; (2) the Divine Compassion acting on as many as it can reach through the nets of the Law and giving them their chance; (3) the Divine Grace which acts more incalculably but also more irresistibly than the others."
(Sri Aurobindo)

0 1967-03-22, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This morning I was also bombarded with a quotation from Sri Aurobindo (they came and bombarded me in the name of Sri Aurobindo!), to tell me that in The Mother it was written that, the Divine Grace can act only in the Truth and I shouldnt forget that! (Mother laughs) There is a quotation from Sri Aurobindo in which he says, the Divine Grace will answer, but do not think it will answer in Falsehood. An admirable sentence. Only, they dont know: they are the possessors of the Truth the Falsehood is the others! And even intelligent people (thats the strange thing, because its so idiotic!), even people anyway, those with a brain, who understand, fall into the trap.
Its very common at the School.

0 1967-07-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is someone here, whose name is S., a man over forty (oh, no, much older than that, I think he is approaching fifty), and he learned French, but so energetically that he writes French really remarkably. He regularly sends me questions in French, and because of the care with which he writes, I reply. The other day, he wrote to me (I forget his exact words, but it was very well put) that he had just realized that aspiration for progress and the result of the aspiration were both the Divine Grace, the effect of the Divine Grace. So I thought, Well, let me see if he knows French well enough to have a sense of humour. And I replied this:
One could say humorously that we are all divine but scarcely know it, and it is just what in us does not know it or is unaware of being divine that we call ourselves!

0 1968-07-06, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have a strong feeling of those marvelous moments of the Divine Grace. All one wants is to keep quiet and worship, thats all.4
Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness.
--
A few days later, P.L. sent Mother a telegram asking for her protection, as he had received an "order from above" to undergo a Collegiate medical examination presided over by the Pope's physician. Thus the situation seemed to have been reversed. Mother's answer was: "The best protection is an unshakable faith in the Divine Grace."
***

0 1968-07-17, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I feel all luminous, the Divine Grace is so powerful that at times I think my body is incapable of holding it; Mothers Presence is so real; the bliss is so serene, so tranquil. The little ADVENTURE begun at the Samadhi becomes so worthy of being lived, the CONSCIOUSNESS has widened so much. Darkness, fear, scruples, mortifications are so far away! A few weeks ago, I had a very painful dream: my body was being torn apart, the pain was excruciating; my feet, my hands, my head were being pulled apart. Today, when I read your letter, I understood the meaning: I had to grow. Just two words to inform you about my situation. As I told you, I found two currents in the Vatican, the first one quite raging against me; we thought that my assuming a new post would calm them down but a few days later, they managed to demand a Collegiate examination (by a neurologist, who, I believe, had been ordered to declare me ill, an endocrinologist, an expert in general medicine, and the Popes physician] hence the cry of the child running to his mother: my telegram asking for Mothers protection. On Sunday the 7th, I had a dream: Mother came into a sort of huge warehouse, where I was lying on the ground, and told me, Quick, get away and leave me your place. I flew away (without my body, which was still on the ground): it was my soul that went away, and, from on high, very high up, I saw Mother taking possession of my body, entering it, and staying put. Suddenly an army of doctors in white robes makes a beeline for my body (in which Mother is still hidden); no sooner have they surrounded and begun examining it than a terrible explosion sends them flying into the air.
(Mother laughs)

0 1968-08-28, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Let the higher intelligences putter along in their own sweet way, which will go on for millennia, and let them leave simple and goodwilled people, those who believe in the Divine Grace, free to move on quietly on their path of light.
Then, here, I have several notes, I dont know what it is.

0 1969-04-26, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Message given for the April 24 darshan: "The best possible way is to allow the Divine Grace to work in you, never to oppose it, never to be ungrateful and turn against it but to follow it always to the goal of Light and Peace and unity and Ananda."
A former minister of the Central government, S. K. Patil.

0 1970-01-31, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
in ones personal power, one must have faith in the Divine Grace.
Its useful for many.

0 1970-07-04, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The conception of the Divine as an external omnipotent Power who has created the world and governs it like an absolute and arbitrary monarch the Christian or Semitic conceptionhas never been mine; it contradicts too much my seeing and experience during thirty years of sadhana. It is against this conception that the atheistic objection is aimed,for atheism in Europe has been a shallow and rather childish reaction against a shallow and childish exoteric religionism and its popular inadequate and crudely dogmatic notions. But when I speak of the Divine Will, I mean something different,something that has descended here into an evolutionary world of Ignorance, standing at the back of things, pressing on the Darkness with its Light, leading things presently towards the best possible in the conditions of a world of Ignorance and leading it eventually towards a descent of a greater power of the Divine, which will be not an omnipotence held back and conditioned by the law of the world as it is, but in full action and therefore bringing the reign of light, peace, harmony, joy, love, beauty and Ananda, for these are the Divine Nature. the Divine Grace is there ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the Law of Ignorance into the Law of Light, and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers. If we take the facts of the world as they are and the facts of spiritual experience as a whole, neither of which can be denied or neglected, then I do not see what other Divine there can be. This Divine may lead us often through darkness, because the darkness is there in us and around us, but it is to the Light he is leading and not to anything else.
Letters on Yoga, 22.174

0 1971-04-17, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The new substances that is spreading and acting in the world contains a warmth, a power, a joy so intense that all intellectual activity seems cold and dry beside it. And that is why the less one talks about these things, the better it is. A single instant, a single impulse of deep and true love, a single minute of deep communion with the Divine Grace brings you much closer to the goal than all possible explanations.
(Questions and Answers, 5.14.1958)

0 1971-08-11, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is only ONE remedy there is only ONE remedyto rely only on the Divine Grace.
(Mother takes Satprems hands)
The only remedy: to put oneself entirely in the hands of the Divine Grace.
The Indo-Russian pact which has just been signed in Delhi by Gromyko and Swaran Singh. This is also the time of Mujibur's trial in Pakistan.

0 1972-04-08, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Tell him (words are so restrictive) that when I heard his letter, I saw I saw and felt the marvelous action of the Divine Grace. There was a sort of flood of Grace concentrated on him, and it stayed there, on himit is there, concentrated on him (embracing gesture).
It is very concretevery concrete and very powerful: a concentration.

0 1972-08-19, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If you could simply. More and more I feel that unless we do this (Mother opens her hands upwards in a gesture of surrender), and leave it, with an INTENSE faith in the Divine Grace, its just impossible.
Like this (same gesture).

02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The fate of India too is being decided in this world-crisison the plains of Flanders, on the steppes of Ukraine, on the farthest expanses of the Pacific. The freedom of India will become inevitable and even imminent in proportion as she becomes cognizant of the underlying character and significance of the present struggle, deliberately takes the side of the evolutionary force, works for the gods, in proportion as she grows to be an instrument of the Divine Power. The instrument that the Divine chooses is often, to all appearances, faulty and defective, but since it has this higher and mightier support, it will surely outgrow all its drawbacks and lapses, it will surmount all dangers and obstacles and become unconquerable. Thisis what the spiritual seeker means by saying that the Divine Grace can make the lame leap across the mountain. India's destiny today hangs in the balance; it lies in the choice of her path.
A great opportunity is offered to India's soul, a mighty auspicious moment is come, if she can choose. If she chooses rightly, then can she arrive at the perfect fulfilment of her agelong endeavour, her life mission. India has preserved and fostered through the immemorial spiritual living of her saints and seers and sages the invaluable treasure, the vitalising, the immortalising power of spirituality, so that it can be placed at the service of terrestrial life for the deliverance of mankind, for the transfiguration of the human type. It is this for which India lives; by losing this India loses all her reason of existenceraison d'tre the earth and humanity too lose all significance. Today we are in the midst of an incomparable ordeal. If we know how to take the final and crucial step, we come out of it triumphant, a new soul and a new body, and we make the path straight for the Lord. We have to recognise clearly and unequivocally that victory on' one side will mean that the path of the Divineof progress and evolution and fulfilmentwill remain open, become wider and smoother and safer; but if the victory is on the other side, the path will be closed perhaps for ever, at least for many ages and even then the travail will have to be undergone again under the most difficult conditions and circumstances. Not with a political shortsightedness, not out of -the considerations of convenience or diplomacy, of narrow parochial interests, but with the steady vision of the soul that encompasses the supreme welfare of humanity, we have to make our choice, we have to go over to the right side and oppose the wrong one with all the integrity of our life and being. The Allies, as they have been justly called, are really our allies, our friends and comrades, in spite of their thousand faults and defects; they have stood on the side of the Truth whose manifestation and triumph is our goal. Even though they did not know perhaps in, the beginning what they stood for, even though perhaps as yet they do not comprehend the full sense and solemnity of the issues, still they have chosen a side which is ours, and we have to stand by them whole-heartedly in an all-round comradeship if we want to be saved from a great perdition.

02.02 - The Message of the Atomic Bomb, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Bomb has shaken the physical atmosphere of the earth as no other engine has done. It has shaken the moral atmosphere too not in a lesser degree. Reason and moral sense could not move man, so Fear has been sent by the Divine Grace. Dante said that God created Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice that seems to be the inevitable gate through which one has to pass to arrive at the Divine. We are indeed in hell today upon earth, a worse can hardly be tolerated.
Indeed this is the bleak winter of human consciousness yet can spring be far behind?

03.01 - The New Year Initiation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the beginning, the sadhaka finds himself a divided personalityin his heart there is the awakening of aspiration, the divine touch, but with all its outward impulses, the physical consciousness remains subject to the control of old fixed habits under the sway of the lower nature. Ordinarily, man is an unconscious sinner, that is to say, he has no sense of the sins he commits. But he becomes a conscious sinner when he: reaches the level of which we are speaking. The conflicts, fears, agonies, compunctions in this stage have perhaps been nowhere more evident than in the life of the Christian seeker. In this state we know what to do but cannot do it the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. We want to do the right thing, we try to do it again and again, yet we fail every time. It is not that we fail only in respect of the movements of our heart and mind, in practice also we commit the same stupidities time and again. These stupiditiesand their name is legionare lust, anger, greed, ignorance, vanity, envy, distrust, disobedience, revolt; repentance, constant repentance and earnest supplication for the Divine Grace that is the remedy, says the devout Christian.
But we, for ourselves, do not give any such supreme place to repentance. For, after all, it is a lower impulse, a vital impulse: as we call it; it does not allow the memory of the sin to be: forgotten; rather by dwelling upon it constantly, it keeps it alive, makes the impression of the sin all the more lurid. And not unoften does it lead to luxuriating in sinfulness Behind the sense of repentance is this consciousness, this idea that man is, by nature, corrupt, his sin is original. That is why the: Christian seeker has accepted sorrow and suffering, abasement and mortification as the indispensable conditions of his sadhana This calls to our mind a witty remark of Anatole France, that prince of humorists, that one could not be a lover of Christ unless one sinned the more one sinned, the more: could one grow in righteousness; the more the repentance, in other words, the more the Divine Grace.
We have said that this is not our path. the Divine Grace is a factwithout that nothing is possible. From one point of view, the Divine Grace is unconditioned. But it does not follow that the precedent of Jagai-Madhai is the invariable law of spiritual life. The law is rather this that the field must be ready, the being and the consciousness must get into a certain mould, attain certain order and disposition so that the descent of the Divine Grace, its manifestation and play may be possible. For, just as the Divine Grace is true, so it is equally true that the individual is essentially one with the Divine, sin and ignorance are his external sloughs, identity with the Divine is his natural right. We, therefore, Jay equal stress on this hidden aspect of man, on the freedom of his will, on his personal effort which is the determining factor of his destiny. For in the field of ignorance or half-knowledge, in the nether hemisphere of his consciousness, it is this power that directly builds up that ordered state of the being with whose support the Divine Grace can actualise itself and give a material shape to the integral fulfilment.
Hence the Mother gives the direction that though external lapses may be natural to our external nature, now that our inner consciousness has awakened, the vision and the earnestness to see and recognise our mistakes have developedassuming that this much of development has taken place in uswe must awake to the situation and be on the alert, we must bring such control to bear upon our vital impulses, upon our nervous centres as will prevent, for good and all, errors and stupidities from upsurging again and invading our physical self and our field of action. When we have reached this stage, we have acquired the capacity to ascend to another level of consciousness. It is then that we can lay the foundations of a new order in the worldit is then that along with the purification, the achievement will begin to take on a material form.

03.02 - Yogic Initiation and Aptitude, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The inner soul the psychicvery often undergoes a secret preparation, develops and comes forward but just waits, as it were, behind the thin though opaque screen; and because of that it gives no objective indication of its growth and readiness. We see no patent sign of what is usually known as fitness or aptitude or capacity. Otherwise how to explain the conversion of a profligate and dilettante like Augustine, or of a rebel like Paul, or of scamps like Jagai-Madhai. Often the purest gold hides in the basest ore, the diamond is coal turned, as it were, inside out. This, one would say, is the Divine Grace that blows where it listsmakes of the dumb a prattler, of the lame a mountain-climber. Yet, but what is this Divine Grace and how does it move and act? It does not act on all and sundry, it does not act on all equally. What is the reason? Appearances often belie the reality: a contrary mask is put on, it would appear, deliberately, with a set purpose. The: sense and significance of this mystery? The hard, obscure, obstinate, rebel outer crust may continue long but it is corroded from within and one day, all on a sudden, it crumbles and dissolves and becomes in a new avatar the vehicle and receptacle of the very thing it opposed and denied.
Virtues are not indications of the fire of the inner soul, nor are vices irremediable obstacles to its growth. The inner soul, we have said, feeds upon allit is indeed fire, the omnivorous, sarvabhuk,virtues and vices and everything else and gather strength from everywhere. The mystery of miracles, of a sudden change or reversal or revolution in consciousness and way of life lies in the omnipotency of the psychic being. The psychic being has the power of making the apparently impossible, for this reason that it is a portion of the almighty Divine, it is the supreme Conscious-Power crystallised and canalised in a centre for the sake of manifestation. It is a particle from the Being, a spark of the Consciousness, a ripple from the Delight cast into the fastnesses of Matter and the, material body. Now, it is the irresistible urge of this particle, this spark, this ripple to grow and expand, to become in the end the Vast the Ocean and the Sun and the sphere of Infinityto become that not merely in an essential status but in a dynamic and apparent becoming also. The little soul, originally no bigger than a thumb, goes forward through one life after another enlarging and intensifying itself till it recovers and establishes its parent reality in this material body here below, till it unveils what is latent within itself, what is its own, what is itself,its integral self-fulfilment, the Divine integrality.

03.03 - Arjuna or the Ideal Disciple, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To say this is to miss the whole nature of discipleship, at least as it is conceived in the Gita. A disciple is not a bundle of qualifications and attainments, however high or considerable they may be. A disciple is first and foremost an aspiring soul. He may not have high qualities to his credit; on the contrary, he may have what one calls serious defects, but even that would not matter if he possessed the one thing needful, the unescapable urge of the soul, the undying fire in the secret heart. Yudhishthira may have attained a high status of sttvic nature; but the highest spiritual status, the Gita says, lies beyond the three Gunas. He is the fittest person for this spiritual life who has abandoned all dharmasprinciples of conduct, modes of living and taken refuge in the Lord alone, made the Lord's will the sole and sufficient law of life. Even though to outward regard such a person be full of sins, the Lord promises to deliver him from all that. It is the soul's love for the Divine given unconditionally and without reserve that can best purify the dross of the inferior nature and render one worthy of the Divine Grace.
Such was Arjuna's capacity; herein lay his strength, his spiritual superiority. It was because he could be so intimate with the Divine as to call him his friend and companion and playmate and speak to him in familiar and homely termseven though he felt contrition for having in this way perhaps slighted the Lord and not paid sufficient regard towards him. Yet this turn of his soul and nature points to the straightness and simplicity and candidness that were there and it was this that helped to call in the Divine and the Divine choice to fall upon him.

04.07 - Readings in Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The deepest and the most fundamental mystery of the human consciousness (and in fact of the earth consciousness) is not that there is an unregenerate aboriginal being there as its bed-rock, a being made of the very stuff of ignorance and I inconscience and inertia that is Matter: it is this that the I submerged being is not merely dead matter, but a concentrated, a solidified flame, as it were, a suppressed aspiration that burns inwardly, all the more violent because it is not articulate and in the open. The aboriginal is that which harbours in its womb the original being. That is the Inconscient Godhead, the Divinity in painMater Dolorosa the Divine Being who lost himself totally when transmuted into Matter and yet is harassed always by the oestrus of a secret flame driving it to know itself, to find itself, to be itself again. It is Rudra, the Energy coiled up in Matter and forging ahead towards a progressive evolution in light and consciousness. That is what Savitri, the universal Divine Grace become material and human, finds at the core of her being, the field and centre of concentrated struggle, a millennial aspiration petrified, a grief of ages congealed, a divinity lone and benumbed in a trance. This divinity has to awake and labour. The god has to be cruel to himself, for his divinity demands that he must surpass himself, he cannot abdicate, let Nature go her own way, the inferior path of ease and escape. The godhead must exercise its full authority, exert all its pressure upon itselftapas taptv and by this heat of incubation release the energy that leads towards the light and the high fulfilment. In the meanwhile, the task is not easy. The divine sweetness and solicitude lights upon this hardened divinity: but the inertia of the Inconscient, the 'Pani', hides still the light within its rocky cave and would not deliver it. the Divine Grace, mellow with all the tears of love and sympathy and tenderness she has gathered for the labouring godhead, has pity for the hard lot of a humanity stone-bound to the material life, yet yearning and surging towards freedom. The godhead is not consoled or appeased until that freedom is achieved and light and immortality released. The Grace is working slowly, laboriously perhaps but surely to that end: the stone will wear down and melt one day. Is that fateful day come?
That is the meaning of human life, the significance of even the very ordinary human life. It is the field of a dire debate, a fierce question, a constant struggle between the two opposing or rather polar forces, the will or aspiration to be and the will of inertia not to be the friction, to use a Vedic image, of the two batons of the holy sacrificial wood, arani out of which the flame is to leap forth. The pain and suffering men are subject to in this unhappy vale of tears physical illness and incapacity, vital frustration or mental confusionare symbols and expressions of a deeper fundamental Pain. That pain is the pain of labour, the travail for the birth and incarnation of a godhead asleep or dead. Indeed, the sufferings and ills of life are themselves powerful instruments. They inevitably lead to the Bliss, they are the fuel that kindles, quickens and increases the Fire of Ecstasy that is to blaze up on the day of victory in the full and integral spiritual consciousness. The round of ordinary life is not vain or meaningless: its petty innocent-looking moments and events are the steps of the marching Divinity. Even the commonest life is the holy sacrificial rite progressing, through the oblations of our experiences, bitter or sweet, towards the revelation and establishment of the immortal godhead in man.
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Savitri, the Divine Grace in human form, is upon earth. The Divine Consciousness has abandoned its own supreme transcendental status to enter into the human consciousness and partake of the earthly life: it has taken up a mortal frame, to live and dwell here below. Only thus she can transform the lower animal nature into the divine nature, raise man to godhead, make of earth heaven itself:
A prodigal of her rich divinity,

04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The crucial problem however lies, in a sense, in the way that the goal is to be reached, in the modus operandi. How is the higher status, whatever it is, to be brought down, made effective, be established here on earth and in life. Ideals there have been always and many; evidently we do not know how to go about the business and actualise what is thought and dreamed. About the new ideal too, suggestions have been made with regard to the path to be followed to reach it and are being tried and tested. Some say a life of inner or ethical discipline, conscious effort on the part of each Individual for his own sake is needed: the higher reality must be reached first by a few individuals, it cannot be attained by 'mass action. Others declare that personal effort will not lead very far; if there is to be a great or fundamental change in human nature, it is the Divine Grace alone that can bring it about. The surpassing of man is a miracle and only the supreme magician as an Avatara can do it. Others, again, are not prone to believe in a physical Incarnationsomewhat difficult usually for a European mind but would accept subtler forces or even superior beings, other than the human category, as aids and agents in the working out of the great future.
It is India's great achievement and speciality that she has found the way the way to all truly high fulfilment. It is Yoga and the Yogic consciousness. Yoga is the science and art of discovering the higher truths, indeed, the highest reality and of living there, not a midway moral elevation only. In its integral view it combines all the three processes mentioned above. The Yogic consciousness seeks to lift the consciousness as high as possible, in fact, to the very highestit literally means union or identity (with the highest Reality, Spirit or God). Thus it has the true perception or vision of the forces that act in and upon the world and the powers that decide and is in union with them. The Yogic consciousness and power is also embodied in the Divine Incarnation for he is Yogeshwara: and in India it is accepted as a commonplace that God descends in a human shape, whenever there is a great crisis and man needs salvaging and salvation. God comes then with all his angels, with the divine host to battle for him and with him to establish the Dharma.

05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, although it may sound somewhat strange and wonderful, nevertheless it is literally true that the body is the fortress par excellence for the individual being: it is not merely an ugly dirty clothing that has to be cast off so that one may go straight to the enjoyment of the beatitude of Paradise; on the contrary, it is, as it were, an armour, a steel-frame that protects the subtle body against the attacks or harsh and cruel touches of other worlds and their beings. Once outside the body, there is every danger for the individual to go astray and be hurt, unless he is guided and protected by a guardian angel, as Dante has had Virgil as his Maestro. We may note here that the passage of Dante from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven across their various levels is almost an exact image of what happens to a soul after death. The highest Heaven where Dante meets Beatrice may be considered as the psychic world and Beatrice herself the Divine Grace that bathes, illumines and comforts the psychic being.
If one has, however, within oneself an ardent and sincere and un flickering flame, one can go through more or less easily and unscathed; but that is rare. Even when alive, in sleep one goes out often into other worlds and the foreign and unpleasant contacts and experiences he has there are recorded in the brain-mind as nightmares: on such occasions the best way to escape is to rush back into the body, the best place of safety. Many have this experience of rushing headlong into the bodydropping into the body, as it werein order to escape from a threatening danger in sleep and waking up all on a sudden to find to one's relief that all was illusion and hallucination.

05.28 - God Protects, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The conditions under which the Divine's protection can come are simple enough, but difficult to fulfil completely and thoroughly. The ideal conditions that ensure absolute safety are an absolute trust and reliance on the Divine Force, a tranquillity and fearlessness that nothing shakes, .whatever the appearances at the moment, the spirit and attitude of an unreserved self-giving that whatever one is and one has is God's. Between that perfect state at the peak of consciousness and the doubting and hesitant and timid mind at the lower end that of St. Peter, forexample, at his weakest moment there are various gradations of the conditions fulfilled and the protection given is variable accordingly. Not that the Divine Grace acts or has to act according to any such hard and fast rule of mechanics, there is no such mathematical Law of Protection in the scheme of Providence. And yet on the whole and generally speaking Providence, Divine Intervention, acts more or less successfully according to the degree of the soul's wakefulness on the plane that needs and possesses the protection.
And yet there is another aspect of the thing that is to be taken into consideration. For in the supreme and ultimate view the world or creation is not divided between God and Asura : the Asura cannot be outside God's infinity, he is there because permitted by him, indeed forms part of him and serves the divine purpose. Asura represents the hard dark passage through which the ignorant human soul cuts out its forward march: it is the crucible in which the growing consciousness is purified of its dross in order to regain the fullness of its divine quality and nature.

05.29 - Vengeance is Mine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The right attitude, then, for a sadhak who has to live dangerously in the world of today is to rise above the turmoils that surge around, to lift the consciousness to a serener height and aspire wholly towards the help and guidance from above, not to be moved by the blast that passes but hold himself firmly anchored upon the rock of ages, the Divine Grace. It is only then that the question can come of actually taking part in the battle of life for it is then that you can act as God's agent or instrument. If you have to take to the field of actual battle you must first receive God's commission (chaprashas Ramakrishna called it), even as Arjuna did.
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05.30 - Theres a Divinity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In our human reckoning, we seem to help the evolutionary course sometimes and sometimes hamper it with our efforts in so far as they are well directed or ill directed. In the practice of spiritual life too, one may be tempted to find a measurable proportion between the personal endeavour and the attainment. However that may be, at the end of all human efforts, the finishing touch always comes from the Divine Grace. Whether we succeed or fail, whatever be the human judgment of the situation, the Grace is sure to intervene in the final stage: to success it will bring more success giving it the peak of fulfilment, and failure too it will transmute into a glorious triumph.
Hamlet, Act v, Sc. ii

06.29 - Towards Redemption, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The origin of creation is an individualisation the manifestation or emanation of many, as units, out of the undivided and indivisible Single. It meant freedom for each unit to choose: the individual became, so to say, a unit of freedom. The immediate result, however, was not very successful, apparently, that is to say. For the individual unit chose to follow a path exactly opposite to its origin: the individualisation happened as if an element shot out of the infinite unity and flung itself in its momentum, as far away as possible, to the other pole. That is how the one spirit became the infinite particles of inconscient matter. The purpose and problem then set was to bring back the straying elements to their source and origin. The work was long travail. It took and it is taking even now ages for the one Being who could do the thing to prepare slowly, mount the steps gradually along which creation slid down, recover the ground painfully and achieve the hidden purpose, vindicating amply the deviation and the fall. Through devious ways, long, winding, arduous marches the spirit of evolution laboured through millenniums; it was the instrument utilised by the Divine Grace.
The original individual was a hard concentrated point of ego, concerned wholly and absolutely with itself. So a situation of give and take was brought about so that even to exist meant to exist through others. Human society began in this way. The solitary human animal for its own sake had to come out of its solitariness, take to a mate and thus gradually bring up a family. The wall of egoism was broken to that extent, its scope extended. The enlargement of the ego continuedstill continuesincreasing the content of the unity. From the family the human ego enlarged into the tribe, and the tribal ego has now enlarged into the nation. Larger and larger aggregates are being formed in place of the original individual unities. The nations too are now approaching and interpenetrating each other and in many ways the whole of humanity has been moving as an aggregate. The individual has thus learnt to find himself in the life of humanity as a whole. He has to look upor will soon have to look upto the whole creation as one existence in and through which he has to exist. Thus the universe is recovering its original indivisible unity, but having gained something in the process; for it is now no longer the featureless unity at the source but an enriched and multiple unity in expression. Furthermore the individual can proceed yet beyond. He has to and now is able to, not only in his individual but in his collective consciousness turn back and move straight to its original unity: he can establish direct contact, commune and unite with the Divine Himself from whom it I came and drifted away. The ranges of ascent are within him I and are in line with those outside which the universe is traversing in the path of evolution. Such is the process the Divine I Grace has undertaken to fulfil the Divine's purpose in creation.

06.36 - The Mother on Herself, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet there is a compulsion. It is the secret pressure of one's own nature that drives it forward through all vicissitudes back again to its original source. When it is said that the Divine Grace can and should do all, it means nothing more and nothing less than that: the Divine Grace only accelerates the process of return and recognition. But on the side of the journeying element, the soul, there must be awakened a conscious collaboration, an initial consent and a constantly renewed adhesion. It is this that brings out, at least helps to establish outside on the physical level, the force that is already and has always been at work within and on the subtler and higher levels. That is the pattern of the play, the system of conditions under which the game is carried out. The Grace works and incarnates in and through a body of willing and conscious collaborators; these become themselves part and parcel of the Force that works.
The truth I bring will manifest itself and will be embodied upon earth; for, it is the earth's and world's inevitable destiny. The question of time is not relevant. In one respect the truth which I say will be made manifest is already fully manifest, is already realised and established: there is no question of time there. It is in a consciousness timeless or eternally present. There is a process, a play of translation between that timeless poise and the poise in time that we know here below. The measure of that hiatus is very relative, relative to the consciousness that measures, long or short according to the yardstick each one brings. But that is not the essence of the problem: the essence is that the truth is there active, in the process of materialisation, only one should have the eye to see it and the soul to greet it.

07.07 - Freedom and Destiny, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You may call this intervention Grace; for without the Divine Grace this could not happen. There is a consciousness and a vision of things where all are brought back to this single source; Grace only exists, nothing else is there. That does everything. But as you have not risen to that summit, not have had that extreme realisation, you have to take into account your own person, your personal aspiration, the thing that calls for the Grace and to which the Grace responds. The two are needed here. Both are ultimately ways of viewing the same truth. The mind, however, finds it difficult to conceive both in a simultaneous movement. The rigid distinctions it makes take away much from the supple and subtle and integral truth of a total experience.
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07.10 - Diseases and Accidents, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You may say again that it is the Divine Grace that saves. But would you explain to me how it works? It would be interesting, indeed, to find out who had precisely the awakened consciousness, had the faith and the inner trust, had called for the help and had in him that which answered automatically and even in a way unconsciouslyto something that came in. Human intelligence is a relative thing and has varying degrees of power. Usually it understands by contrasts and contraries. It does not understand a truth in its absoluteness. For example, I have received hundreds of letters thanking me because they were saved from dangers. But I do not remember to have received a letter thanking me because things were normal and nothing had happened. Men perceive the action of Grace only when there is the atmosphere of the pessimist and there is a danger and they had escaped from it, that is to say, when there is already the beginning of the accident, when the accident has come to pass. When they come out of the danger safely only then they take note of the force that saved. Otherwise they would not have even thought of it. If the voyage they undertook came off without any accident they would not think of any action of Grace present there. They would take it as a matter of course. But precisely because it is so, there may be acting here a Grace of a higher order and there may be existing already a deeper pre-existent harmony between the consciousness of the person and the higher force to which it responds. The chance of an accident is already the beginning of the dislocation I spoke of. But the situation becomes complicated if it is a case of collective accident. The result here depends upon the atmosphere of the persons involved. It is the proportion of these two elements in the personnel of a collective accident that determines the character and magnitude of the accident.
I will tell you a story, I mean a true story, in this connection. There was a pilot who was considered what is called an ace among his fellowmen in the first Great War. He was an extraordinary aviator and the hero of many victories. Nothing had happened to him at any time. But towards the end of his life, an event occurredsome private tragedy and all at once he had the feeling that something was going to happen to him; an accident perhaps, and it was all finished with him. He had come out of the war but was still in the army. He wanted to make a flight to South Africa, from France right up to the south of Africa. He started from France and made for Madagascar, so far as I remember, and then wanted to fly back to France. Now, my brother was at that time the Governor of Congo and needed to join his post as soon as possible. He asked for a place in the aeroplane of the pilot I am speaking about. It was not a regular service plane, but one of those used for trial to show what the machines were capable of and the skills of the airmen. Many tried to dissuade my brother from making the journey, saying that these adventurous trips were, always dangerous. My brother however did not mind the risk. Nothing serious happened, but for a slight breakdown in the middle of the Sahara which was easily got over, and the plane made safe journey and dropped him at his place in Congo. The plane continued further down, to Madagascar, as I said. Now the pilot started back, he did half the journey, his plane crashed and he was killed forthwith. I shall explain to you what really the matter was. What happened had to happen, it was a foregone conclusion. My brother had an absolute faith in his destiny, a certainty that nothing would touch him. The consciousness of the other was on the contrary full of doubt and apprehension. So the mixture of the two atmospheres brought about this that in the first instance the accident could not be prevented, but it stopped short of a catastrophe. But once the destiny of my brother was not there with the machine,like Caesar's destiny that made the boatman row safely across the river through a storm the protection was also withdrawn and the pilot had to go down under the full blast of his bad fate. I can narrate another analogous story, it is with regard to a ship. There were two persons, husb and and wife. They went by air to Indo-China. They had an accident, a very serious accident. All were killed except only these two. Now they had to return to France. They did not want to travel by air, they had had an experience of it. So they took a boat, I mean a ship, which they thought would be quite safe. Now what happened was absolutely unexpected, quite extraordinary. In the middle of the Red Sea, in broad daylight, the ship struck against a reef and sanka thing that does not happen even once perhaps in a million cases. All the passengers were drowned except, miraculous again to say, the couple. There are people like thatthey carry misfortune with them, but the misfortune is for others, they themselves escape some-how.

07.37 - The Psychic Being, Some Mysteries, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The psychic will and psychic development are things that are completely outside the range of common notions. Ideas of justice and reward and punishment have no place here at all. Any people come to me and complain: What have I done in my past life that I have to be under such difficult conditions now, to suffer so much! I always reply: But don't you see it is a blessing for you, the Divine Grace upon you? In your past life perhaps you yourself asked for such conditions so that you may make greater progress through them! This way of looking at the thing may seem very novel. But truth lies that way.
How is it possible for a psychic being once living the life of intelligence and creativity to enter again into a life of stupidity and ordinariness?

08.28 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Divine Grace counteracts the Karma wholly; the Grace melts Karma, as the sun melts butter. If you have an aspiration sincere enough, or a prayer intense enough you can bring down into you something that will change everything.
II

08.38 - The Value of Money, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is a catastrophe to have money. It makes you stupid, it makes you avaricious, it makes you wicked. It is one of the biggest calamities in the world. Money is a thing which one should not possess unless and until he is without desire, without attachment. When one has a consciousness as wide as the earth, then only one can have all the money there is upon earth and that would be good for everybody. But until then as much money as you have, so much the curse there is upon you. I will tell this to the face of everybody, even to the face of the man who considers it a merit to be rich. It is a calamity; it is also perhaps a disgrace, a fall from the Divine Grace, the expression of a Divine discontent.
It is infinitely more difficult to be rich and also to be wise, intelligent and generousto be generous, please note,when one is rich than when one is poor. I have seen and known many persons in many countries; the most generous persons were always the poorest. As soon as the pocket becomes full, you are seized as if with a malady, a sordid attachment to money. I assure you it is a malediction.
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Over and above this, if such people possess a higher spiritual consciousness, then they can use the force to build slowly upon earth something that will be able to manifest the Divine Power and the Divine Grace. It is then that this force of money, of wealth, this power of Finance, instead of being a curse, as I have said, would be a blessing for the welfare of all. The saying goes that it is the worst people who become the best. I hope the best do not become the worst, for that would be sad indeed.
The greatest power, when used ill, can be a very great calamity; the same power used well can be a blessing.

09.03 - The Psychic Being, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Meditation the Divine Grace
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part NineThe Psychic Being
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Meditation the Divine Grace

09.04 - The Divine Grace, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:09.04 - the Divine Grace
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
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the Divine Grace
I
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The years pass, events roll on. You progress, become more conscious, understand better. And when you look back, you discover, at first with surprise, later on with a smile, that the special circumstances which once appeared to you disastrous or unfavourable were just the very best thing that could have happened for your needed progress. And if you were a little wiser you would say, "Truly, the Divine Grace is infinite!"
And when this happens to you a good number of times, you begin to understand that in spite of man's blindness and wrong appearances, the Grace is at work everywhere and because of the Grace it is the best possible that happens in the state where the world is at a given moment.
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Whatever may be the faith and the trust you have in the Divine Grace, whatever your capacity of seeing it at work in all circumstances, at every moment and at all points of life, you can never fully understand the marvellous immensity of its action and the precision and the exactitude with which it works. Never shall one grasp in what degree the Grace does everything, is behind everything, organises everything in order that the advance towards the divine realisation may be as swift, as complete, as total as it can be under the given circumstances of the world.
As soon as you come in contact with it, you find that there is not a second in time, not a point in space which does not show in a signal manner this ceaseless work of the Grace, its constant intervention. And once you have seen that, you feel you are never up to the mark. For you must never forget that you must not have fear or anguish or regret or recoil or even suffering. If you were in union with this Grace, if you saw it everywhere, you would begin to live a life of exultation, all power and infinite happiness. And that would be the best possible collaboration in the Divine Work.
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And if to that now you add the ardour of faith and trust in the Divine Grace and that self-giving to the Grace which makes you wait upon the Divine for everything, then it becomes a formidable matter. You can see before your eyes things happening more and more, the most wonderful things realised one after another.
But there are conditions to fulfil: a great purity must be there and a great intensity in the self-giving and that absolute trust in the supreme wisdom of the Divine Grace which knows better than us what is truly good for ourselves. If the aspiration is offered to That and the offering is made truly and with enough intensity, the result will be marvellous.
But then you must be able to see. When things are realised, most often people find that quite natural; they do not care to see even why and how it has so happened; they simply say, "Yes, but of course it had to be so." And thus they lose the joy of gratefulness. After all, if one can be full of gratefulness and gratitude for the Divine Grace, then that is the last thing; you begin to see that at every step things are exactly what they should be and the very best that can be. It is then that Sachchidananda begins to gather Himself and refashion His Unity.
***

09.05 - The Story of Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Divine Grace How Can Time Be a Friend?
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part NineThe Story of Love
--
the Divine Grace How Can Time Be a Friend?

10.03 - Life in and Through Death, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The soul carries the body even like a corpse, says a scripture. It is a dead inert mass of inconscience weighing upon the conscious being that is behind. Such is the burden of life that the soul bears through its earthly existence. The image is beautifully delineated in the Indian legend of Shiva and Sati. Sati is dead, the bereaved Shiva goes about in anguish with the dead body of Sati flung upon his shoulder. Shiva is to be relieved of this burden, otherwise the creation will go to rack and ruin. The prayer went to Vishnu and Vishnu hurled his discus that cut to pieces the corpse of Sati the pieces were fifty-two in number and each spot where a piece, a limb of Sati, fell became a great place of pilgrimage. Even so, the world in its inconscience lies heavy on the secret Consciousness that is behind. It lies almost smothered under the dead weight of the inconscient and the unconsciousness. But the Divine Grace has entered into the inertial mass and split it up, entered into each particle as a spark of consciousness to turn gradually the dead matter into a rising and evolving tier of consciousness.
Creation started originally with an absolutely inconscient existence. It is the pressure of an indwelling spirit the Grace descending into matter that has forced matter to burst into, to flower into forms of light and consciousness. The pressure is ever-present and the flowering continues into higher and higher modes of the Divine Consciousness. The figure '52' of the mythological legend denotes perhaps the integral multiplicity of the manifested universe. We may suggest an interpretation just to satisfy a mental curiosity: 52=50+2; and 50 is 5 X 10. The number 5 is very well-known as representing the five planes of consciousness, and as there is a descending and an ascending movement in each level that gives the number 10. And 5 times 10 is 50. This makes up the manifested creation. The remaining two are the Supreme Divine and his Shakti, or two unities at each end the one above, the one below. This however may be considered as a playful calculation meaning to represent, as I said, a multiple integrality of existence.

10.11 - Beyond Love and Hate, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Education is Organisation the Divine Grace and Love
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part TenBeyond Love and Hate
--
Education is Organisation the Divine Grace and Love

10.12 - The Divine Grace and Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
object:10.12 - the Divine Grace and Love
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
--
the Divine Grace and Love
The mother says that there can be Love without Grace as there can also be Grace without Love, although the two are essentially one and the same.

10.13 - Go Through, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Divine Grace and Love Night and Day
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta Part TenGo Through
--
the Divine Grace and Love Night and Day

1.01 - Two Powers Alone, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5:If part of the being surrenders, but another part reserves itself, follows its own way or makes its own conditions, then each time that that happens, you are yourself pushing the Divine Grace away from you.
6:If behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for your desires, egoistic demands and vital insistences, if you put these things in place of the true aspiration or mix them with it and try to impose them on the Divine Shakti, then it is idle to invoke the Divine Grace to transform you.
7:If you open yourself on one side or in one part to the Truth and on another side are constantly opening the gates to hostile forces, it is vain to expect that the Divine Grace will abide with you. You must keep the temple clean if you wish to instal there the living Presence.
8:If each time the Power intervenes and brings in the Truth, you turn your back on it and call in again the falsehood that has been expelled, it is not the Divine Grace that you must blame for failing you, but the falsity of your own will and the imperfection of your own surrender.
9:If you call for the Truth and yet something in you chooses what is false, ignorant and undivine or even simply is unwilling to reject it altogether, then always you will be open to attack and the Grace will recede from you. Detect first what is false or obscure in you and persistently reject it, then alone can you rightly call for the divine Power to transform you.

10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Mans refusal of the Divine Grace has been depicted very beautifully and graphically in a perfect dramatic form by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri. The refusal comes one by one from the three constituent parts of the human being. First of all man is a material being, a bodily creature, as such he is a being of ignorance and misery, of brutish blindness. He does not know that there is something other than his present state of misfortune and dark fate. He is not even aware that there may be anything higher or nobler than the ugliness he is steeped in. He lives on earth-life with an earth-consciousness, moves mechanically and helplessly through vicissitudes over which he has no control. Even so the material life is not a mere despicable thing; behind its darkness, behind its sadness, behind all its infirmities, the Divine Mother is there upholding it and infusing into it her grace and beauty. Indeed, she is one with this world of sorrows, she has in effect become it in her infinite pity and love so that this material body of hers may become conscious of its divine substance and manifest her true form. But the human being individualised and separated in egoistic consciousness has lost the sense of its inner reality and is vocal only in regard to its outward formulation. It is natural for physical man therefore to reject and deny the physical Godhead in him, he even curses it and wants to continue as he is. He yells therefore in ignorance and anguish:
I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he

10.29 - Gods Debt, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Earth moves forward through man who is its flowering and man moves forward through his representative, the higher man, who reveals and embodies still greater potentialities of God's creation, having the privilege of being so conscious as to contact the gods and God Himselfhe is master of life-force (awapati); he climbs to the summits and brings down upon earth the heavenly riches and the Divine Grace, which fulfils, transmuting all debits into credits.
***

1.03 - The Gods, Superior Beings and Adverse Forces, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Each time that we have made a decisive step in our spiritual progress, the invisible enemies of the Divine always try to take their revenge, and when they cannot injure the soul they strike the body. But all their efforts are in vain and will finally be defeated, for the Divine Grace is with us.
We must never give a chance to the adverse forces to do their mischief they take advantage of the slightest unconsciousness.

1.05 - Morality and War, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For all those whom the Divine Grace has kept far from the horrible conflict which is tearing men apart, the only way to express their gratitude is by a complete consecration of their whole being to the divine work.
May 1940
--
The best protection is an unshakable faith in the Divine Grace.
Protection is active and can be effective only with faith on your side, absolute and constant.

1.05 - War And Politics, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Similarly, when France, after the fall of Dunkirk, rejected Churchill's proposal of a common citizenship for Britain and France so that they might carry on the fight as one country, the Mother seems to have considered it a rejection of the Divine Grace itself that had come to the help of France at the most opportune moment. The entire speech of Churchill was dictated in the occult way by the Mother, we were told.
To resume our talk:
--
"She said something to this effect: 'One should leave the matter of the Cripps' offer entirely in the hands of the Divine, with full confidence that the Divine will work everything out. Certainly there were flaws in the offer. Nothing on earth created by man is flawless, because the human mind has a limited capacity. Yet behind this offer there is the Divine Grace directly present. The Grace is now at the door of India, ready to give its help. In the history of a nation such opportunities do not come often. The Grace presents itself at rare moments, after centuries of preparation of that nation. If it is accepted, the nation will survive and get a new birth in the Divine's consciousness. But if it is rejected the Grace will withdraw and then the nation will suffer terribly, calamity will overtake it.
"'Only some months ago, the same Grace presented itself at the door of France, immediately after the fall of Dunkirk, in the form of Churchill's offer to her to have joint nationality with England and fight the enemy. Sri Aurobindo said that it was the right idea, and it would also have helped His work immensely. But France could not raise herself above the ordinary mind, and rejected it. So the Grace withdrew and the Soul of France has gone down. One doesn't know when the real France will be up again.

1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
gods as India; nowhere has the Divine Grace been poured out in a
more liberal measure on all classes of society from kings down to

1.08 - Attendants, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Some critics might find this a very rosy picture of Champaklal, drawn, as one would expect, by a colleague who would keep the thorns out of their sight. Thorns he has, who has not? In 1935, when I knew very little of him, I wrote to Sri Aurobindo, "Champaklal came to the Dispensary and had an outburst with me. I am sure he will tell the Mother about it." He replied, "Champaklal does not usually tell Mother about these things outbursts of that kind are too common with him. And when heat meets heat It is almost midsummer now." Champaklal is himself aware of his defects and repents them very much. Sometimes on the verge of despair, he confesses that complete change of nature is impossible except by the Divine Grace. More than once after losing his temper with me, not always without cause, he regretted his explosion and said, "I hope you won't mind; you know my nature," and became his old sweet self. He has a streak of Bholanath in him, and says that he must have been an avadht[2] in his previous life. He has prayed again and again to the Mother for the removal of this weakness in his nature. He is outspoken, very straightforward the Mother has vouched for it he cannot bear any kind of insincerity. He cannot make or even see any compromise made with falsehood; his nature is alien to the ways of the world. Much of his apparent rudeness and ill temper stems from this uncompromising spirit. This, of course, does not save him from misjudging people at times, but when shown his fault, he never tries to cover it up. I believe that there should be someone who is upright and unsparing, and as firm as steel when all around there is such a mixture of motives. He serves as the gate-keeper of Heaven. Parodying Sri Aurobindo's verse, "None can reach Heaven who has not passed through Hell," I would mutter, "None can go to the Mother who has not passed through Champaklal!"
To make the path easy to Heaven, or at least to get Heaven's blessings more easily, is also possible by his intervention. If the Mother is at times reluctant for some reason to give a birthday card to someone or write a person's name or "love and blessings" on it, if she refuses to see another on his birthday, Champaklal appeals to her divine compassion and makes her rescind her decision. The Mother sometimes asks him, "What shall I write?" "Why, love and blessings, Mother!" is his reply. He says that he suffered a lot in his childhood because people could not understand his nature. He now wants to distribute the Divine's largesse whenever and wherever he can. Many people are grateful to him for procuring the Mother's blessings for them, especially her physical touch. Only one must be frank and straightforward. Sometimes he has gone out of his way to help even an unknown and unpresuming person to get the Mother's touch if he thought that he had been overlooked. To sum up, his soul's mission is to serve the Mother, to look after her and to make her love and compassion available to all, rich or poor, worthy or unworthy, young or old, without any distinction. I shall now conclude my "rosy picture" of Champaklal by quoting Sri Aurobindo's estimate of him: "All have their defects, but Champaklal has great qualities to atone for them."

1.2.01 - The Call and the Capacity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is useless to raise the question of fitness. No one is fit - for all human beings are full of faults and incapacities - even the greatest sadhaks are not free. It is a question only of aspiration, of believing in the Divine Grace and letting the Divine work in you, not making a refusal.
It is difficult to say that any particular quality makes one fit or the lack of it unfit. One may have strong sex impulses, doubts, revolts and yet succeed in the end, while another may fail. If one has a fundamental sincerity, a will to go through in spite of all things and a readiness to be guided, that is the best security in the sadhana.
--
You speak of your possible unfitness, but it is not a question of fitness or unfitness. There is nobody who can go on in his own strength or by right of his fitness to the goal of the sadhana. It is only by the Divine Grace and reliance on the Divine Grace that it can be done. It is in a strength greater than your own that you must put your first and last reliance. If your faith falters you have to call on that to sustain you; if your force is insufficient against the ill-will and opposition that surround
34

1.2.04 - Sincerity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
One cannot be perfect in discrimination at once or in rejection either. The one indispensable thing is to go on trying sincerely till there comes the full success. So long as there is complete sincerity, the Divine Grace will be there and assist at every moment on the way.
If he [the sadhak] is sincere, there is bound to be devotion.

1.2.07 - Surrender, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It [the idea that the sadhana is done by the Divine rather than by oneself] is a truth but a truth that does not become effective for the consciousness until or in proportion as it is realised. The people who stagnate because of it are those who accept the idea but do not realise - so they have neither the force of tapasya nor that of the Divine Grace. On the other hand those who can realise it feel even behind their tapasya and in it the action of the Divine Force.
Surrender and Tapasya

1.2.08 - Faith, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I ask you to have faith in the Divine, in the Divine Grace, in the truth of the sadhana, in the eventual triumph of the spirit over its mental and vital and physical difficulties, in the Path and the
Guru, in the existence of things other than are written in the philosophy of Haeckel or Huxley or Bertr and Russell, because if these things are not true, there is no meaning in the Yoga.
--
Do not allow any discouragement to come upon you and have no distrust of the Divine Grace. Whatever difficulties are outside you, whatever weaknesses are inside you, if you keep firm hold on your faith and your aspiration, the secret Power will carry you through and bring you back here. Even if you are oppressed with opposition and difficulties, even if you stumble, even if the way seems closed to you, keep hold on your aspiration; if faith is clouded for a time, turn always in mind and heart to us and it will be removed. As for outer help in the way of letters we are perfectly ready to give it to you. But keep firm on the way - then in the end things open out of themselves and circumstances yield to the inner spirit.
Whatever adverse things present themselves you must meet them with courage and they will disappear and the help come. Faith and courage are the true attitude to keep in life and work always and in the spiritual experience also.

1.2.11 - Patience and Perseverance, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There can be no doubt about the Divine Grace. It is perfectly true also that if a man is sincere, he will reach the Divine. But it does not follow that he will reach immediately, easily and without delay. Your error is there, to fix for God a term, five years, six years, and doubt because the effect is not yet there. A man may be centrally sincere and yet there may be many things
Patience and Perseverance

1.24 - The Killing of the Divine King, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
outpouring of the Divine Grace, was regarded as necessary in order
to enable them to discharge their civil and religious duties. Thus

1.4.01 - The Divine Grace and Guidance, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.4.01 - the Divine Grace and Guidance
author class:Sri Aurobindo
--
The Divine Will works in all things - it may work out anything whatever. the Divine Grace comes in to help and save.
If you would know what is the Divine Grace, it is necessary first to realise that it is something which contradicts the law of the world, for it is outside its normal rule and not of its nature. There is here something which does not seem to govern at all the cosmic action, but only to intervene, and yet it is always there; an element without which this universe would be either a tremendous machine or a fortuitously and yet inexorably ordered chance. For to our observation all here is a process, a mechanism of Ignorance and Inconscience manifesting a precarious consciousness distressed by a nostalgia of Truth that exists somewhere and yet seems to be unseizable and unrealisable, - a mechanism of Law that controls a frightening whirl of Forces, a mechanism of implacable justice measuring things by a mysterious and to us unintelligible balance, a mechanism of evolution with matter and inconscience as its starting point, a precarious and groping life and consciousness as its highest realised term and as its final uncertain poise some possibility of the Divine.
Our senses can discover no visible presence of the Divine, our intellect can do without any idea of its intervention - but it is another experience than that of the intellect and the senses which once it is there will no longer let us escape from the Presence or refuse to see the intervening Will or Grace.
--
I should like to say something about the Divine Grace - for you seem to think it should be something like a Divine Reason acting upon lines not very different from those of human intelligence.
But it is not that. Also it is not a universal Divine Compassion either, acting impartially on all who approach it and acceding to all prayers. It does not select the righteous and reject the sinner.
--
Cosmic Law, of Karma or what else; (2) the Divine Compassion acting on as many as it can reach through the nets of the Law and giving them their chance; and (3) the Divine Grace which
the Divine Grace and Guidance
--
X's realisation of his being should not come in its own way by growth from within, not by the Divine Grace if his mind objects to that description, but let us say by the spontaneous movement of the Self within him.
For, as to this "Grace", we describe it in that way because we feel in the infinite Spirit or Self of existence a Presence or a
--
Self chooses, to him it reveals its own body." Well, that is the same thing as what we call the Divine Grace, - it is an action from above or from within independent of mental causes which decides its own movement. We can call it the Divine Grace; we can call it the Self within choosing its own hour and way to manifest to the mental instrument on the surface; we can call it the flowering of the inner being or inner nature into selfrealisation and self-knowledge. As something in us approaches it or as it presents itself to us, so the mind sees it. But in reality, it is the same thing and the same process of the being in Nature.
I could illustrate my meaning more concretely from my own first experience of the Self, long before I knew even what Yoga was or that there was such a thing, at a time when I had no religious feeling, no wish for spiritual knowledge, no aspiration beyond the mind, only a contented agnosticism and the impulse towards poetry and politics. But it would be too long a story, so
--
"The ordinary action of the Divine is a constant intervention within the actual law of things" - that may or may not be but is not usually called the Divine Grace. the Divine Grace is something not calculable, not bound by anything the intellect can fix as a condition - though ordinarily some call, aspiration, intensity of the psychic being can awaken it, yet it acts sometimes without any apparent cause even of that kind.
the Divine Grace and Guidance
--
Divine, it depends on what you mean by the phrase. If it implies dependence on the Divine Grace and equanimity and patience in the persistent aspiration, then it is all right. But it must not be extended to cover slackness and indifference in the aspiration and endeavour.
172
--
Trust in the Divine Grace
Face all these things [inner disturbances] quietly and firmly with perseverance in the endeavour of the sadhana. Trust firmly in the Divine Grace and the Divine Grace will not fail you.
The best possible way [to "repay" the Divine Grace] is to allow the Divine Grace to work in you, never to oppose it, never to be ungrateful and turn against it - but to follow it always to the goal of Light and Peace and unity and Ananda.
Withdrawal of Grace

1928 12 28p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is the Power, the Happiness, the Light, the Knowledge, the Bliss, the Love, the Peace that flow from the Divine Grace.
***

1929-06-23 - Knowledge of the Yogi - Knowledge and the Supermind - Methods of changing the condition of the body - Meditation, aspiration, sincerity, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But whatever you do, whatever the process you use, and even if you happen to have acquired in it a great skill and power, you must leave the result in the hands of the Divine. Always you may try, but it is for the Divine to give you the fruit of your effort or not to give it. There your personal power stops; if the result comes, it is the Divine Power and not yours that brings it. You question if it is right to ask the Divine for these things. But there is no more harm in turning to the Divine for the removal of a physical imperfection than in praying for the removal of a moral defect. But whatever you ask for or whatever your effort, you must feel, even while trying your best, using knowledge or putting forth power, that the result depends upon the Divine Grace. Once you have taken up the Yoga, whatever you do must be done in a spirit of complete surrender. This must be your attitude,I aspire, I try to cure my imperfections, I do my best, but for the result I put myself entirely into the hands of the Divine.
Does it help, if you say, I am sure of the result, I know that the Divine will give me what I want?

1951-04-05 - Illusion and interest in action - The action of the divine Grace and the ego - Concentration, aspiration, will, inner silence - Value of a story or a language - Truth - diversity in the world, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1951-04-05 - Illusion and interest in action - The action of the Divine Grace and the ego - Concentration, aspiration, will, inner silence - Value of a story or a language - Truth - diversity in the world
author class:The Mother
--
But whatever you ask for or whatever your effort, you must feel, even while trying your best, using knowledge or putting forth power that the result depends upon the Divine Grace.
Questions and Answers 1929 (23 June)
But first you must will it, I believe that is quite important! There is no one method to follow. I read this and at the same time ask myself how many people would be satisfied to hear this. All the materialism and positivism in the world have been constructed just because people do not want the Divine Grace to come in at all. If they are cured they want to say, It is I who cured myself; if they make a progress, they want to think, It is I who have progressed; if they organise something, they want to proclaim, It is I who am organising. And many, many of those who try to do otherwise, if they look within themselves, would see how seldom spontaneously, sincerely (not as when one says something because one knows it should be said, or as one thinks something because it is the fashion to think like that but spontaneously, sincerely, with all their heart) they know that it is not they who have done the thing, but the divine force. When they have made a progress, when they have changed something in themselves, when they have learnt something, then when is it that spontaneously, without an effort of will, without thinking, without needing to tell oneself, One ought to think like this, spontaneously one knows that without the divine force nothing would have been done? Look into yourself, it is a very interesting thing, very interesting, how many times a day you think (without even telling yourself), I have done this, I have been able to do that, I succeeded in this, I failed in that, and when you have made a good effort, when you have obtained a result, you need a little moment for thought, or more, to tell yourself, If the divine force had not helped me, probably I would not have been able to do it. The spontaneous thing is, Oh! I have succeeded, isnt that true? There is indeed a part of the mind which has been educated, which has learnt, has reflected, understood, which is well-disposed and truly feels that in reality it is like that, but this is only one part of the mind, and it is not always active, sometimes it must be called up, asked its advice, What is then the best attitude to have?, What should I think? I believe all who have taken up yoga, if they are sincere, if they reflect for a moment, tell themselves, I was not aware of it, but if I have succeeded, it was probably because the divine forces were there to help me, otherwise I would not have been able to succeed. This is well understood. But there comes a moment when one knows that one would not have been able to lift a finger if these forces had not been there. That comes later. But to begin with, how many times, if one thinks, if one quite simply observes oneself, does one catch oneself saying, It is I! And, then, one congratulates oneself sometimes, one says, After all I can do something, I am capable! I am going further: how many people would be capable of doing anything at all if simply deprived of the pleasure of being able to tell themselves, I have done this, I have realised that, I have made a progress, how well I played this game? How many people would be able to sincerely do something if this pleasure were taken away? I have known individuals whose mind was much more developed than the rest of the being, they had understood very well (almost too well); they sat down to meditate and all their energy was gone, all vitality evaporated into a kind of peace, not unpleasant, but very still. There is no more need to do anything, no longer any need to move, one dreams. Under a tree, arms crossed, one leaves the Divine to do everything for oneself, including feeding you if you need it. This is perhaps very well, but this shows that the instrument is not ready; it is not really at the service of the Divine, it is at the service of the ego, and when the ego is taken away, it does nothing any longer. Therefore, so long as one lives in the ego this illusion is necessary to make you act; it is necessary to keep up action until one is completely transformed or, in any case, till the true consciousness is established.
I have said this and I repeat it (Mother takes up her book):

1951-05-05 - Needs and desires - Discernment - sincerity and true perception - Mantra and its effects - Object in action- to serve - relying only on the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One does not have the discernment because one does not care to have it! Listen, I dont think there is a single instance in which one does not find within oneself something very clear, but you must sincerely want to knowwe always come back to the same thingyou must sincerely want it. The first condition is not to begin thinking about the subject and building all sorts of ideas: opposing ideas, possibilities, and entering into a formidable mental activity. First of all, you must put the problem as though you were putting it to someone else, then keep silent, remain like that, immobile. And then, after a little while you will see that at least three different things may happen, sometimes more. Take the case of an intellectual, one who acts in accordance with the indications of his head. He has put the problem and he waits. Well, if he is indeed attentive, he will notice that there is (the chronological order is not absolute, it may come in a different order) at first (what is most prominent in an intellectual) a certain idea: If I do that in this way, it will be all right; it must be like that, that is to say, a mental construction. A second thing which is a kind of impulse: That will have to be done. That is good, it must be done. Then a third which does not make any noise at all, does not try to impose itself on the others, but has the tranquillity of a certitudenot very active, not giving a shock, not pushing to action, but something that knows and is very quiet, very still. This will not contradict the others, will not come and say, No, thats wrong; it says simply, See, it is like this, thats all, and then it does not insist. The majority of men are not silent enough or attentive enough to be aware of it, for it makes no noise. But I assure you it is there in everybody and if one is truly sincere and succeeds in being truly quiet, one will become aware of it. The thinking part begins to argue, But after all, this thing will have this consequence and that thing will have that consequence, and if one does this and this, and that and its noise begins again. The other (the vital) will say, Yes, it must be done like that, it must be done, you dont understand, it must, it is indispensable. There! Then you will know. And according to your nature you will choose either the vital impulse or the mental leading, but very seldom do you say quite calmly, Good, it is this I am going to do, whatever happens, and even if you dont like it very much. But it is always there. I am sure that it is there even in the murderer before he kills, you understand, but his outer being makes such a lot of noise that it never even occurs to him to listen. But it is always there, always there. In every circumstance, there is in the depth of every being, just this little (one cant call it voice, for it makes no sound) this little indication of the Divine Grace, and sometimes to obey it requires a tremendous effort, for all the rest of the being opposes it violently, one part with the conviction that what it thinks is true, another with all the power, the strength of its desire. But dont tell me that one cant know, for that is not true. One can know. But one does not always know what is necessary, and sometimes, if one knows what is to be done, well, one finds some excuse or other for not doing it. One tells oneself, Oh! I am not so sure, after all, of this inner indication; it does not assert itself with sufficient force for me to trust it. But if you were quite indifferent, that is, if you had no desire, either mental or vital or physical desire, you would know with certainty that it is that which must be done and nothing else. What comes and gets in the way is preferencepreferences and desires. Every day one may have hundreds and hundreds of examples. When people begin to say, Truly I dont know what to do, it always means that they have a preference. But as here in the Ashram they know there is something else and as at times they have been a little attentive, they have a vague sensation that it is not quite that: It is not quite that, I dont feel quite at ease. Besides, you were saying a while ago that it is the result which gives you the indication; it has even been said (it has been written in books) that one judges the divine Will by the results! All that succeeds has been willed by the Divine; all that doesnt, well, He has not willed it! This is yet again one of those stupidities big as a mountain. It is a mental simplification of the problem, which is quite comic. Thats not it. If one can have an indication (in proportion to ones sincerity), it is uneasiness, a little uneasinessnot a great uneasiness, just a little uneasiness.
Here, you know, you have another means, quite simple (I dont know why you do not use it, because it is quite elementary); you imagine I am in front of you and then ask yourself, Would I do this before Mother, without difficulty, without any effort, without something holding me back? That will never deceive you. If you are sincere you will know immediately. That would stop many people on the verge of folly.

1953-06-03, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You have said here that we are tied to the chain of Karma, but then sometimes when the Divine Grace acts, that contradicts
Completely, the Divine Grace completely contradicts Karma; you know, It makes it melt away like butter thats put in the sun.
That is what I was saying just now. What you have just told me is another way of speaking. I was putting myself in your place and asking: There you are, if you have an aspiration thats sincere enough or a prayer thats intense enough, you can bring down in you Something that will change everything, everythingtruly it changes everything. An example may be given that is extremely limited, very small, but which makes you understand things very well: a stone falls quite mechanically; say, a tile falls; if it gets loose, it will fall, wont it? But if there comes, for example, a vital or mental determinism from someone who passes by and does not want it to fall and puts his hand out, it will fall on his hand, but it will not fall on the ground. So he has changed the destiny of this stone or tile. It is another determinism that has come in, and instead of the stone falling on the head of someone, it falls upon the hand and it will not kill anybody. This is an intervention from another plane, from a conscious will that enters into the more or less unconscious mechanism.

1953-07-22, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You are given an illness purposely to make you progress? Surely it is not like that. Actually, you may turn the thing round and say that there are people whose aspiration is so constant, whose goodwill so total that whatever happens to them they take as a trial on the path to make progress. I knew people who, whenever they fell ill, took that as a proof of the Divine Grace to help them to progress. They told themselves: it is a good sign, I am going to find out the cause of my illness and I shall make the necessary progress. I knew a few of this kind and they moved on magnificently. There are others, on the contrary, who, far from making use of the thing, let themselves fall flat on the ground. So much the worse for them. But the true attitude when one is ill, is to say: There is something that is not all right; I am going to see what it is. You must never think that the Divine has purposely sent an illness, for that would truly be a very wicked Divine!
Even so, there are microbes in water?

1953-08-19, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But for one who has faith in the Divine Grace, the return to the Light becomes easy.2
"Love is universal and eternal; it is always manifesting itself and always identical in its essence. And it is a Divine Force; for the distortions we see in its apparent workings belong to its instruments. Love does not manifest in human beings alone; it is everywhere. Its movement is there in plants, perhaps in the very stones; in the animals it is easy to detect its presence."

1953-10-07, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now, you are speaking of dynamic faith. Dynamic faith is something different. If one has within him faith in the Divine Grace, that the Divine Grace is watching over him, and that no matter what happens the Divine Grace is there, watching over him, one may keep this faith all ones life and always; and with this one can pass through all dangers, face all difficulties, and nothing stirs, for you have the faith and the Divine Grace is with you. It is an infinitely stronger, more conscious, more lasting force which does not depend upon the conditions of your physical build, does not depend upon anything except the Divine Grace alone, and hence it leans on the Truth and nothing can shake it. It is very different.
Sometimes children ask us why we are here. What should we tell them?
--
The very tiny ones, if they ask this, it is wonderful. There is only one very simple answer to give them: My children, it is because this is the divine will. It is due to the Divine Grace that you are here. Be happy, be calm, be at peace, do not question, all will be well. And when they grow older they already begin to reason, then it is no longer so well, no longer so easy. But that depends, as I said, that depends upon how intelligent they are, how great is their opening. There are those who are predestined, who are here because they should be here. With these it is easy. You have only to tell them: My children, it is because you belong to a future which is being built up, and it is here that it is being built. For them it is very simple, it is true. There are those who are here because their parents are here, for no other reason. So it is difficult to tell them that, unless you tell them quite simply: Because your father and mother are here.
But how can we understand?

1953-11-18, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice.
The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrixthrough identityof the Divine Grace with a perfect knowledgethrough identityof the absolute mechanism of Universal Justice.
And through her mediation each movement of sincere and confident aspiration towards the Divine calls down in response the intervention of the Grace.

1953-11-25, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You have said: It is in proportion to our trust in the Divine that the Divine Grace can act for us and help.1 If someone has no trust in the Divine, but calls very sincerely when he is in difficulty, in danger, what will happen to him?
How can he call? The two things are contradictory. If he has no trust, he wont even think of the Divine! He wont think of calling. It is contradictory. He thinks of calling exactly in proportion to his trust. So?
--
It is not altogether like that. The divine Consciousness works always, everywhere and in the same way. the Divine Grace is active everywhere, and in all circumstances in the same way. And so on. But according to your personal attitude, you create within yourself the conditions for receiving what is done or not receiving it. And trustindeed, trust in the Truth, trust in the Grace, trust in the divine Knowledgethis puts you in that state of receptivity in which you can receive these things. Whilst, if you have no trust you may still try to receive something there are people, for instance, who fling a sort of challenge, they throw a challenge at the Divine and tell him: Heres the situation such as it is, I am in these conditions which seem to me at least inextricable, it is impossible to get out of them. But if the Divine pulls me out of the difficulty, I shall put my trust in him. There are many people they do not formulate it like this but many feel and think in this way. Well, this is the worst of all possible conditions. Generally it puts you into a complete hole. And it is exactly the state most opposed to trustfulness. And besides, it is quite a vulgar bargaining: If you do this for me, I shall have faith that you exist. I am going to try and see if you really exist and whether you are what they say. Do this, and we are going to see clearly if you succeed. Then I shall trust in you. And many people do that, even without being aware of it. Any number of men say: How can I have trust in the Divine? I have such a lamentable and unhappy life! That is to say, they limit the divine Consciousness to their little personal needs.
If one has the trust, does the help come automatically?
--
Each time that we have made a decisive step in our spiritual progress, the invisible enemies of the the Divine always try to have their revenge and when they cannot injure the soul they strike the body, but all their efforts are in vain and will finally be defeated, for the Divine Grace is with us.
Words of the Mother, CWM Vol. 15, p. 22

1953-12-16, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Power? It is usually the psychic which guides the being. One knows nothing about it because one is not conscious of it but usually it is that which guides the being. If one is very attentive, one becomes aware of it. But the majority of men havent the least idea of it. For instance, when they have decided, in their outer ignorance, to do something, and instead of their being able to do it, all the circumstances are so organised that they do something else, they start shouting, storming, flying into a rage against fate, saying (that depends on what they believe, their beliefs) that Nature is wicked or their destiny baleful or God unjust, or no matter what (it depends on what they believe). Whilst most of the time it is just the very circumstance which was most favourable for their inner development. And naturally, if you ask the psychic to help you to fashion a pleasant life for yourself, to earn money, have children who will be the pride of the family, etc., well, the psychic will not help you. But it will create for you all the circumstances necessary to awaken something in you so that the need of union with the Divine may be born in your consciousness. At times you have made fine plans, and if they had succeeded, you would have been more and more encrusted in your outer ignorance, your stupid little ambition and your aimless activity. Whilst if you receive a good shock, and the post you coveted is denied to you, the plan you made is shattered, and you find yourself completely thwarted, then, sometimes this opposition opens to you a door on something truer and deeper. And when you are a little awake and look back, if you are in the least sincere, you say: Ah! it wasnt I who was rightit was Nature or the Divine Grace or my psychic being who did it. It is the psychic being which organised that.
Is it the psychic will which wants the being to be identified with the Divine?

1954-07-07 - The inner warrior - Grace and the Falsehood - Opening from below - Surrender and inertia - Exclusive receptivity - Grace and receptivity, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes. This means that it would be going against its work, its own work. The Grace has come; well, it works for the realisation of the truth. If it accepts the conditions laid upon it by the falsehood, it can no longer do anything. Of this, you know, I could give you countless examplesof people who insist that things should happen in a particular way as far as they are concerned. They implore, at times even demand that things should be like that; and what they ask for is absolutely contrary to the truth; and if the Grace obeyed their demand, it would go against its own purpose and defeat its own purpose, that is, it would go against its own work and aim. It comes here to realise the truth; if it obeys the falsehood, it turns its back on truth. And people, you see, very often put the cart before the horsemost often through ignorance and stupidity; but sometimes it is also through bad will that they insist on having their conditions fulfilled, that they go in for a kind of bargaining in exchange for their surrender, and they do it. Yes, many do it unconsciously I said through ignorance and stupidity. There are others who do it consciously, and so they want their conditions fulfilled. They say, If it is like this and like that And finally they go as far as to say to the Divine, If you are like this and like that, if you fulfil the conditions I lay down for you, I shall obey you! They dont put it in this way because that would be too ridiculous, but they almost constantly do it. You see, they say, Oh, the Divine is like this. The Divine does this. The Divine must respond like this. And they continue in this way, and they are not aware that they are quite simply imposing their conceptions and also their desires on what the Divine ought to be and do. And so, when the Divine does not do what they want or does not fulfil the conditions they lay down, they say, You are not the Divine! (Laughter) It is very simple. You do not fulfil the conditions I lay down, so you are not the Divine! But they do it constantly, you know. So, naturally, if to please people, the Divine Grace were to submit to their demands, it would be working entirely against its own purpose and would destroy its own Work.
(To another child) Now, do you have a questions?
--
Thats something quite different. To help, thats understood, He is there to help. But what is said here means to sit idly not doing anything, not making the shadow of an effort, nor even aspiring or willing, nothing, and then say, Well, God will do this for me; the Divine will do everything for me. the Divine Grace will give me aspiration. If I need aspiration, It will give it to me. If I need surrender, It will give me that, and so on. I have to do nothing except to remain passively seated, without stirring and without willing anything. Well, there are people like that, many! They are told Aspire. Give me aspiration. (Laughter) They are told, Be generous. Oh, make me generous; and I shall give everything! (Laughter)
And then? (To another child) Now, you!
--
I thought about it. I think he wrote the sentence in this way so that it would be more easily understandable. But in fact, what he meant he has said here: You are yourself rejecting the Grace. Isnt that it? He sayswhere is it? what page? page four? Yes, pushing the Divine Grace from you, yes; you are yourself pushing the Divine Grace away from you. No, it is not that; it is (The child begins reading: the Grace) No, after that, my child It will not act (To another child) This is what we have explained. That is something else. You see, this is what I have explained: you ask the Grace to do something for you, but this thing is a falsehood. It wont do it, because It always acts only in the truth.
But then how can It come to the help of the sinner?
--
But there is a sentence here thats here we are, it is absolutely true: You are yourself pushing the Divine Grace away from you, and then there is a (The lamp had to be switched on and this made a noise in the mike. Mother shows a little surprise, then continues turning the pages of the book to find the sentence.) I thought it was here (She finds the sentence and reads) Then here we are, always you will be open to attack and the Grace will recede from you. You see, this (silence) It is not the Grace which recedes from you, it is you who recede from the Grace. It is a feeling, and the expression of the fact. For in the sentence a preceding sentence, we have: You are yourself pushing the Divine Grace away from you. This is just the thing. You are yourself pushing the Divine Grace away from you. But after having pushed It away, you have the impression that It has receded from you; and it is rather this: then always you will be open to attack and the Grace will recede from you. It is not a fact that It recedes from you, you have the impression that It recedes from you.
While reading it I noticed this. I dont know what it is in English. Here it is on page seven. I dont know, it must be approximately on the same page, I suppose: If you call for the Truth, something like that.
--
It expresses ones impression. But it is not that the Grace withdraws. For it is written here, you see, just a little before, it is not the Divine Grace you must blame, it is you who push It away from you.
In one case he takes the position of the Grace and in the other he takes the attitude of the person who says, The Grace recedes from me. But it is not the Grace that recedes, it is he himself who pushes It away, that is, he has put a distance between himself and the Grace. In fact, even pushing away doesnt give the correct picture; you see, this is not written, it was not written to a philosopher, and it is not in philosophical terms. In one case, you see, he has taken this particular attitude, but the phenomenon is the same; that is, there is a kind of psychological distance created between the Grace and the individual. And due to this psychological distance the individual cannot receive the Grace and feels that It is not there. But It is there, in fact; only, as he has established this distance between the two, he doesnt feel It any longer. This is the real phenomenon. It isnt that the Grace goes away, it isnt even that he has the power to push It away, for if It doesnt want to go, no matter how much he tries, It wont go. But he makes himself incapable of feeling It and receiving its effect. He creates a psychological barrier between himself and the Grace.

1954-07-21 - Mistakes - Success - Asuras - Mental arrogance - Difficulty turned into opportunity - Mothers use of flowers - Conversion of men governed by adverse forces, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sweet Mother, do we push the Divine Grace away from us every time we make a mistake?
Eh? You push it away every time you make a mistake?
Well, there are two different kinds of mistakes. There is the fault committed through ignorance. That remain a fault, and it puts a veil between the Grace and you, but it is a fault made without knowing that one is making a mistake. But as soon as one knows that it is a mistake, one must absolutely refrain from making it, because each time one makes it, it is true that one builds a wall between oneself and the Divine Grace.
There is a very big difference between the mistake made through ignorance which one will not make again as soon as one knows it is a mistake, and the mistake made knowing that it is a mistake. And this, indeed, is called obstinacy! And this is more serious, it is even very serious! It veils the consciousness very much, veils it so much that after some time one no longer knows at all that one is making mistakes. One makes them thinking that he doesnt. One gives so many excuses and justifications for everything he does, that he ends up by believing that he is no longer making any mistakes at all. Then, here, it becomes very serious, because one is incorrigible!
--
With the touch of the Divine Grace, how do difficulties become opportunities for progress?
Opportunities for progress? Yes! Well, this is something quite obvious. You have made a big mistake, you are in great difficulty: then, if you have faith, if you have trust in the Divine Grace, if you really rely on It, you will suddenly realise that it is a lesson, that your difficulty or mistake is nothing else but a lesson and that it comes to teach you to find within yourself what needs to be changed, and with this help of the Divine Grace you will discover in yourself what has to be changed. And you will change it. And so, from a difficulty you will have made great progress, taken a considerable leap forward. This, indeed, happen all the time. Only, you must be truly sincere, that is, rely on the Grace and let It work in younot like this: one part of you asking to be helped and another resisting as much as it can, because it doesnt want to change this is the difficulty.
All that he is saying, all the time, is: completely, totally, sincerely, without reserve. For there is one part of the being which has an aspiration, there is one part of the being which gives itself, and there are other parts sometimes a small part, some times a big one which hides nicely, right at the bottom, and keeps absolutely quiet so that it may not be found out, but which resists with all its might, so as not to change.
And so one wonders with, Oh, I had such a beautiful aspiration, I had so much goodwill, I had such a great desire to change, and then, see, I cannot! Why? Then, of course, your mental arrogance comes in and says, I didnt get the response I deserved, the Divine Grace doesnt help me, and I am left all alone to shift for myself, etc., etc.
It is not that. It is that hidden somewhere there is a tiny something which is well coiled up, in there, doubled up, turned in upon itself and well hidden, right at the bottom, as at the bottom of a box, which refuses to stir. (Mother speaks very softly.) So when the effort, the aspiration wane, die down, this springs up like that, gently, and then it wants to impose its will and it makes you do exactly what you did not want to do, what you had decided you would not do, and which you do without knowing how or why! Because that thing was there, it had its turn for small things, big things, for the details, even for the direction of life.

1954-08-04 - Servant and worker - Justification of weakness - Play of the Divine - Why are you here in the Ashram?, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Um! So! We justify all our weaknesses? It is not a positive want of self-confidence; it is a lack of confidence in what the Divine Grace can do for us. To justify ones weaknesses is a kind of laziness and inertia.
Well, when one doesnt want to make an effort to correct oneself, one says, Oh, it is impossible, I cant do it, I dont have the strength, I am not made of that stuff, I dont have the necessary qualities, I could never do it. It is absolute laziness, it is in order to avoid the required effort. When you are asked to make progress: Oh, it is beyond my capacity, I am a poor creature, I can do nothing! Thats all. It is almost ill-will. It is extreme laziness, a refusal to make any effort. One accepts all ones defects and incapacities in order not to have to make the necessary effort to overcome them. One says, I am like that, I cant be otherwise! It is a refusal to let the Divine Grace work in you. It is a justification of your own ill-will.
Has someone there a question? Or isnt there any?

1954-09-22 - The supramental creation - Rajasic eagerness - Silence from above - Aspiration and rejection - Effort, individuality and ego - Aspiration and desire, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You have said that one must know that without the Divine Grace one is nothing. Then why make such a great effort to know that one is nothing?
Why make such a great effort? In what see? You want to make this effort for a personal reason? Is it for your personal satisfaction that you want to make this effort? It is like those people who say, But if it is not I who work and if it is not my work, how can I work? It is the same thing, and yet it is like that. If you feel like that, it means that you still need, need very much, your ego and that if your ego were suddenly taken away from you, you could no longer do anything. If you need a personal motive in order to do something, it means that you are still entirely in your ego, you understand. So long as it is necessary, one has to remain in it. Only, you must not then think that you can go fast. It takes a very long time, sometimes several lives, sometimes a great number of lives. If you need personal reasons for doing things, you have only to wait till you grow out of it and understand that it is not for a personal reason that you must do things.

1954-09-29 - The right spirit - The Divine comes first - Finding the Divine - Mistakes - Rejecting impulses - Making the consciousness vast - Firm resolution, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For example, you see, as soon as one feels a wave of physical disequilibrium, of ill health coming, well, to concentrate in the right spirit is to concentrate in an inner calm, a trust in the Divine Grace, and a will to remain in physical equilibrium and good health. This is the right spirit. In another case, one may feel a wave of anger or a fit of temper coming from outside; then one should withdraw into an inner calm, a detachment from superficial things, with a will to express only what comes from above and always be submissive to the divine Will. This is the right spirit. And in each case it is something like that. Naturally it always comes back to the same thing, that one must remember the Divine and put oneself at His service and will what He wills.
But in one case you may want the calm, in the other you may want the force, in another still you may want health, in yet another something which resists the pressure from outside.
--
Sweet Mother, one day you said that if one makes mistakes knowing that one is making a mistake, one pushes the Divine Grace away and builds a wall, a veritable wall between the Divine and oneself.
I dont remember exactly what I said, but there is one thing: if you make a mistake knowing that it is a mistake and committing it all the same, then you do that. If through ignorance you make a mistake because you dont know that it is a mistake, you may have very unpleasant consequences but you wont push away the Divine, because you have done the thing through ignorance. Thats not to say that the fault is not a fault! It is a fault all the same, but as I said, you are not in the state in which you push away the Divine Grace. But if you know that it is a fault and commit it all the same, each time you do so you are pushing away the Divine Grace, and you push it away a little farther.
Mother, there are mistakes one knows they are mistakes, but still it is as though one were pushed into making them. Then?

1954-12-22 - Possession by hostile forces - Purity and morality - Faith in the final success -Drawing back from the path, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The faith spoken about is faith in the Divine Grace and the final success of the undertaking. You have begun the yoga and have faith that you will go through to the end of your yoga But if you spend your time looking at all that prevents you from advancing, then finally you say, Ah, I shall never succeed! It is not possible. If it goes on in this way, I shall never get there. So this is to lose ones faith. One must always keep the faith that one is sure to succeed.
Many people begin, and then after some time come and tell you, Oh, I shall never be able to go through. I have too many difficulties. So this means not having faith. If one has started, one begins with the faith that one will reach the goal. Well, this faith should be kept till the very end. Keeping ones faith, one attains the end. But if in the middle of the road you turn back saying, No, I cant, then, obviously you will not reach the end. Some people start on the way and then, after some time, they find it heavy-going, tiring, difficult, and also that they themselves, their legs, dont walk well, their feet begin to ache, e. You see, they say, Oh, it is very hard to go forward. So instead of saying, I have started, I shall go through, which is the only thing to do, they stand there, stop there, lamenting and saying, Oh, I shall never be able to succeed, and then they leave the path. So, obviously, if they leave the path, they will never succeed. This is to lose ones faith.
--
You will tell me that it is very difficult to keep it, but children keep it very well. They must have truly come upon particularly detestable parents to lose it; but if their parents are simply good enough, they keep this very well. Well, it is this attitude; if you can tell yourself, Good, perhaps the Divine Grace deserves our confidence, simply this, nothing else, you will avoid many difficulties, many. In fact this avoids many difficulties even in ordinary life, and many worries. And particularly here, if you can do that, well, you will see things which seemed formidably difficult dissolving suddenly like clouds.
There we are, thats all.

1955-02-09 - Desire is contagious - Primitive form of love - the artists delight - Psychic need, mind as an instrument - How the psychic being expresses itself - Distinguishing the parts of ones being - The psychic guides - Illness - Mothers vision, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You mean whether it needs to go through the mind? Thank God, no, because it would be a very difficult operation. The psychic need is an expression of the Divine Grace and it is expressed by the Divine Grace.
Psychic life in the universe is a work of the Divine Grace. Psychic growth is a work of the Divine Grace and the ultimate power of the psychic being over the physical-being will also be a result of the Divine Grace. And the mind, if it wants to be at all useful, has only to remain very quiet, as quiet as it can, because if it meddles in it, it is sure to spoil everything.
So there will be no need of the mind?

1955-03-09 - Psychic directly contacted through the physical - Transforming egoistic movements - Work of the psychic being - Contacting the psychic and the Divine - Experiences of different kinds - Attacks of adverse forces, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In all cases, without exception, whatever may happen, calm and quietude and serene peace and an absolute faith in the Divine Graceif you have all this, nothing can happen to you. And you must have all this if you want to have experiences; because experiences without thisits not good; but with this, its excellent.
***

1955-04-06 - Freuds psychoanalysis, the subliminal being - The psychic and the subliminal - True psychology - Changing the lower nature - Faith in different parts of the being - Psychic contact established in all in the Ashram, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Which part of the being in everyone has a more total faith in the Divine Grace?
The psychic.
Ah, no! I am speaking of an experience, I am not speaking of a verbal knowledge. I am speaking which is the part in everyone of you in which you have the greatest faith in the Divine Grace? It can be in the physical, it can be in the vital, it can be in the psychic, and it can be in this part or that, or this activity or that other. There are people, for example, who have absolutely a kind of mental realisation of contact with the Grace, of faith in the Grace; and then, as soon as they are in their vital or physical consciousness, there is nothing any more. There are others, on the contrary, who, even physically, in their body who perhaps dont have much mental knowledge, but who in their physical consciousness have an absolute faith in the Divine Grace, and a total trust, and they live like that in this faith and trust. Others still have it only in their deep feelings; and their thoughts are vagabond. And there are others who have even a vital faiththese are rare but they existwho have a vital faith in the Divine Grace, that all will always go absolutely wellwith a considerable sense of power.
But havent you ever lent yourself to this little exercise, to see? First, have you faith in the Divine Grace?
Yes.
--
This is another phenomenon. It means that this faith, this trust in the Divine Grace is in the psychicbehind, there, like that, in the psychic, always there. So sometimes it is the feeling, sometimes it is the thought, sometimes even it is the body which is in contact with the psychic, under the influence of the psychic even without knowing it; and at that moment this kind of trust, of faith comes in front like that and supports. This happens when one has momentary contacts with his psychic. For example, when you find yourself in a very great difficulty or a very great physical danger, and suddenly feel this, this force coming into you, the force of a faith, an absolute trust in the Divine Grace which helps you. So it means that there is a conscious contact with ones psychic and it comes to help youit is a special grace bestowed. This is the condition which ought to be the most frequent here, for this contact is established all the time, consciously, deliberately, in everyone. So this instance ought to be the most frequent, it is the most normalhere. That is, according to the part which is active or according to the necessity of the moment, it is here or there or there that suddenly you feel this trust which takes possession of you and guards you. It is like that.
There we are!

1955-07-13 - Cosmic spirit and cosmic consciousness - The wall of ignorance, unity and separation - Aspiration to understand, to know, to be - The Divine is in the essence of ones being - Realising desires through the imaginaton, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, as I said, there are two things. First, as regards desires, personal circumstances, one is not very persistent or very steady, and after some time what interested you very strongly doesnt interest you any longer. You think of something else, have another desire, and make another formation. But now the first thing one imagined is very well formed; after following its curve in space it is realised. But by then the person has started another construction because for some reason or other the thing doesnt interest him any more, and he is face to face with the realisation of his first desire, while having already embarked upon the second, the third or the fourth. So he is absolutely annoyed: But why, I dont want this any longer, why does it come? without his being conscious that quite simply it is the result of a previous deed. If, however, instead of being desires they are aspirations for spiritual things and one continues his line with a regular progress, then one is absolutely sure to obtain one day what he has imagined. The day may be slightly far-off if there are many obstacles on the path, for example if the formation that you have made is still very alien to the state of the earth atmosphere; well, it takes some time to prepare the conditions for its advent. But if it is something which has already been realised several times on earth and does not imply too categorical a transformation, you may have it quite quickly, provided that you follow the same line persistently. And if you add to this the ardour of a faith and trust in the Divine Grace and that kind of self-giving to the Grace which makes you expect everything from It, then it can become tremendous; you can see things being realised more and more, and the most surprising ones can be realised one after another. But for this there are conditions to be fulfilled.
One must have a great purity and a great intensity in ones self-giving, and that absolute trust in the supreme wisdom of the Divine Grace, that It knows better than we do what is good for us, and all that. Then if one offers ones aspiration to It, truly gives it with enough intensity, the results are marvellous. But one must know how to see them, for when things are realised most people find it absolutely natural, they dont even see why and how it has happened, and they tell themselves, Yes, naturally it had to be like that. So they lose the joy of the joy of gratitude, because, in the last analysis, if one can be filled with gratitude and thanksgiving for the Divine Grace, it puts the finishing touch, and at each step one comes to see that things are exactly what they had to be and the best that could be.
There.

1955-12-07 - Emotional impulse of self-giving - A young dancer in France - The heart has wings, not the head - Only joy can conquer the Adversary, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
These are saved only by their trust in the Divine Grace. Because, even if they act foolishly and land in difficult situations, there will always be something which comes and pulls them out of the hole at the last moment. A little like the mother cat catching its young one which is going to drown because it has made a mistake and wanted to walk upon watershe catches it, pulls it, brings it out. A little like that.
But it is always said that one must not tempt God. One should not do something throughhow to put it sweetlypremature boldness, with the idea: Oh, it doesnt matter, the Divine will always pull me out of the difficulty. This is not good. Because instead of helping the work, it complicates it.

1956-01-25 - The divine way of life - Divine, Overmind, Supermind - Material body for discovery of the Divine - Five psychological perfections, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So, unless one adds to faith a total and complete trust in the Divine Grace, there will be difficulties. So both are necessary.
Now, we have put devotion in this series. Yes, devotion is all very well, but unless it is accompanied by many other things it too may make many mistakes. It may meet with great difficulties.

1956-03-07 - Sacrifice, Animals, hostile forces, receive in proportion to consciousness - To be luminously open - Integral transformation - Pain of rejection, delight of progress - Spirit behind intention - Spirit, matter, over-simplified, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For you are always under the illusion that pain belongs to you. This is not true. Pain is something thrust upon you. The same event could occur, exactly the same in all its details, without its inflicting the shadow of a pain on you; on the contrary, sometimes it can fill you with ecstatic joy. And it is exactly the same thing. But in one case, you are open to the adverse forces you want to reject from yourself, and in the other you are not, you are already too far away from them to be affected by them any longer; and so, instead of feeling the negative side they represent, you feel only the positive side the Divine represents in the experience. It is the Divine Grace which makes you progress, and with the Divine Grace you feel the divine Joy. But instead of identifying yourself with the Grace which makes you progress, you identify yourself with the ugly thing you want to get rid of; and so, naturally, you feel like it and suffer.
That is an experiment you can make if you are just a little conscious. There is something in you which you dont want, something bad for one reason or another you dont want it, you want to pull it outwell, if you identify yourself ever so little with that thing, you feel the pain of the extraction; if, on the contrary, you identify yourself with the divine Force which comes to liberate you, you feel the joy of the Divine Grace and you experience the deep delight of the progress you have made.
And this is a sure sign for you, a sure indication of what you identify yourself with. If you are identified with the forces from below, you suffer; if you are identified with the forces from above, you are happy. And I am not speaking about feeling pleasure; you must not think that when one jumps about, dances, shouts and plays, one is identified with the divine forcesone may or may not be. That is not what I am speaking of. I am speaking of the divine Joy, the inner Joy which is unalloyed.

1956-07-25 - A complete act of divine love - How to listen - Sports programme same for boys and girls - How to profit by stay at Ashram - To Women about Their Body, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Perfect harmony of proportions, suppleness and strength, grace and force, plasticity, endurance and, above all, an excellent health, unvarying, unchanging, the result of a pure soul, of a joyful trust in life and an unshakable faith in the Divine Grace.
The brochure ends with the following words:

1956-08-01 - Value of worship - Spiritual realisation and the integral yoga - Symbols, translation of experience into form - Sincerity, fundamental virtue - Intensity of aspiration, with anguish or joy - The divine Grace, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:1956-08-01 - Value of worship - Spiritual realisation and the integral yoga - Symbols, translation of experience into form - Sincerity, fundamental virtue - Intensity of aspiration, with anguish or joy - the Divine Grace
author class:The Mother
--
You must know, you must understand the reason for this anguish. And then, if you can introduce just one more element in your aspiration, that is, your trust in the Divine Grace, trust in the divine Response, it counterbalances all possible anguish and you can aspire without any disturbance or fear.
This brings us to something else, which is not positively a question, but a request for an explanation, a comment or a development of the subject. It is about Grace.
I have said somewhere, or maybe written, that no matter how great your faith and trust in the Divine Grace, no matter how great your capacity to see it at work in all circumstances, at every moment, at every point in life, you will never succeed in understanding the marvellous immensity of Its Action, and the precision, the exactitude with which this Action is accomplished; you will never be able to grasp to what extent the Grace does everything, is behind everything, organises everything, conducts everything, so that the march forward to the divine realisation may be as swift, as complete, as total and harmonious as possible, considering the circumstances of the world.
As soon as you are in contact with It, there is not a second in time, not a point in space, which does not show you dazzlingly this perpetual work of the Grace, this constant intervention of the Grace.

1956-08-08 - How to light the psychic fire, will for progress - Helping from a distance, mental formations - Prayer and the divine - Grace Grace at work everywhere, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Therefore, even if one has no knowledge at all but has trust in the Divine Grace, if one has the faith that there is something in the world like the Divine Grace, and that this something can answer a prayer, an aspiration, an invocation, then, after making ones mental formation, if one offers it to the Grace and puts ones trust in it, asks it to intervene and has the faith that it will intervene, then indeed one has a chance of success.
Try, and you will surely see the result.
--
Excuse me, that depends on the tenor of the prayer. If one simply invokes the Grace or the Divine, and puts oneself in His hands, one does not expect a particular result. To expect a particular result one must formulate ones prayer, must ask for something. If you have only a great aspiration for the Divine Grace and evoke it, implore it, without asking it for anything precise, it is the Grace which will choose what it will do for you, not you.
That is better, isnt it?
--
I have already told you this several times. When you are in a particular set of circumstances and certain events take place, these events often oppose your desire or what seems best to you, and often you happen to regret this and say to yourself, Ah! how good it would have been if it were otherwise, if it had been like this or like that, for little things and big things. Then years pass by, events are unfolded; you progress, become more conscious, understand better, and when you look back, you noticefirst with astonishment, then later with a smile that those very circumstances which seemed to you quite disastrous or unfavourable, were exactly the best thing that could have happened to you to make you progress as you should have. And if you are the least bit wise you tell yourself, Truly, the Divine Grace is infinite.
So, when this sort of thing has happened to you a number of times, you begin to understand that in spite of the blindness of man and deceptive appearances, the Grace is at work everywhere, so that at every moment it is the best possible thing that happens in the state the world is in at that moment. It is because our vision is limited or even because we are blinded by our own preferences that we cannot discern that things are like this.

1956-08-15 - Protection, purification, fear - Atmosphere at the Ashram on Darshan days - Darshan messages - Significance of 15-08 - State of surrender - Divine Grace always all-powerful - Assumption of Virgin Mary - SA message of 1947-08-15, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo has made a study of all this in The Life Divine, and he tells us that there are sure signs of a progressive evolution. An evolution naturally tends towards a goal, and if it is a progressive evolution one may continue to think that all is the expression of the Divine Grace and Will, but that at the same time all is not as it ought to be. Everything is in accordance with the divine Will, but everything is not as it ought to be, otherwise things would not move.
And there we are faced with the problem once more.
--
Now that the Supermind has manifested on the earth, it must naturally follow that the Divine Grace is all-powerful, and I am asked: Is this right?
the Divine Grace has always been all-powerful.

1956-08-22 - The heaven of the liberated mind - Trance or samadhi - Occult discipline for leaving consecutive bodies - To be greater than ones experience - Total self-giving to the Grace - The truth of the being - Unique relation with the Supreme, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is never to lose the idea of the total self-giving to the Grace which is the expression of the Supreme. When one gives oneself, when one surrenders, entrusts oneself entirely to That which is above, beyond all creation, and when, instead of seeking any personal advantage from the experience, one makes an offering of it to the Divine Grace and knows that it is from This that the experience comes and that it is to This that the result of the experience must be given back, then one is quite safe.
In other words: no ambition, no vanity, no pride. A sincere self-giving, a sincere humility, and one is sheltered from all danger. There you are, this is what I call being greater than ones experience.

1956-11-21 - Knowings and Knowledge - Reason, summit of mans mental activities - Willings and the true will - Personal effort - First step to have knowledge - Relativity of medical knowledge - Mental gymnastics make the mind supple, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And that is why instead of telling you when you are a little mite, to do (laughing) what those little children are asked to do, to sit still and enter or pretend to enter into meditation, instead of telling you that you must be in constant contemplation and totally indifferent to all things in the world, that you must have only one thought, to prepare yourself to receive the Divine Grace, instead of that you are told, No, try to become developed and conscious beings who know things and have healthy, strong, agile bodies capable of doing exceptional things, an adequate will and a rich, supple, agile mind; these will be useful for the future realisation.
That is why, moreover, people who are used to judging from appearances and without knowing what they are talking about, say that in the Ashram there is no spiritual life, that we lead an altogether material life. Thats how it is! But it is so much the worse for them, it is not any the worse for us; indeed it is all the same to us.

1957-01-23 - How should we understand pure delight? - The drop of honey - Action of the Divine Will in the world, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Naturally, with this continuous discipline, in a very short time the desires will keep their distance and will no longer bother you. So you will be free to enter a little more deeply into your being and open yourself in an aspiration to the Giver of Delight, the divine Element, the Divine Grace. And if this is done with a sincere self-giving something that gives itself, offers itself and expects nothing in exchange for its offeringone will feel that kind of sweet warmth, comfortable, intimate, radiant, which fills the heart and is the herald of Delight.
After this, the path is easy.

1957-02-13 - Suffering, pain and pleasure - Illness and its cure, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Quite naturally we ask ourselves what this secret is, towards which pain leads us. For a superficial and imperfect understanding, one could believe that it is pain which the soul is seeking. Nothing of the kind. The very nature of the soul is divine Delight, constant, unvarying, unconditioned, ecstatic; but it is true that if one can face suffering with courage, endurance, an unshakable faith in the Divine Grace, if one can, instead of shunning suffering when it comes, enter into it with this will, this aspiration to go through it and find the luminous truth, the unvarying delight which is at the core of all things, the door of pain is often more direct, more immediate than that of satisfaction or contentment.
I am not speaking of pleasure because pleasure turns its back constantly and almost completely on this profound divine Delight.
--
But for that one must be neither cowardly nor fearful. When the physical disorder comes, one must not be afraid; one must not run away from it, must face it with courage, calmness, confidence, with the certitude that illness is a falsehood and that if one turns entirely, in full confidence, with a complete quietude to the Divine Grace, It will settle in these cells as It is established in the depths of the being, and the cells themselves will share in the eternal Truth and Delight.
***

1957-03-13 - Our best friend, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In 1961 when this talk was first published, Mother commented on this phrase: "So long as one repeats one's mistakes, nothing can be abolished, for one recreates them every minute. When someone makes a mistake, serious or not, this mistake has consequences in his life, a 'Karma' which must be exhausted, but the Divine Grace, if one turns to It, has the power of cutting off the consequences; but for this the fault must not be repeated. One shouldn't think one can continue to commit the same stupidities indefinitely and that indefinitely the Grace will cancel all the consequences, it does not happen like that! The past may be completely purified, cleansed, to the point of having no effect on the future, but on condition that one doesn't change it again into a perpetual present; you yourself must stop the bad vibration in yourself, you must not go on reproducing the same vibration indefinitely."
***

1957-03-20 - Never sit down, true repose, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The minute one stops going forward, one falls back. The moment one is satisfied and no longer aspires, one begins to die. Life is movement, it is effort, it is a march forward, the scaling of a mountain, the climb towards new revelations, towards future realisations. Nothing is more dangerous than wanting to rest. It is in action, in effort, in the march forward that repose must be found, the true repose of complete trust in the Divine Grace, of the absence of desires, of victory over egoism.
True repose comes from the widening, the universalisation of the consciousness. Become as vast as the world and you will always be at rest. In the thick of action, in the very midst of the battle, the effort, you will know the repose of infinity and eternity.

1957-06-19 - Causes of illness Fear and illness - Minds working, faith and illness, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother, how are medicines to be used for a body which is not altogether unconscious? For even when we draw on the Divine Grace, we see that we need a little medicine, and if a little medicine is given it has a good effect. Does this mean that only the body needs medicine or is there something wrong with the mind and the vital?
In most cases the use of medicineswithin reasonable limits, that is, when one doesnt poison oneself by taking medicinesis simply to help the body to have confidence. It is the body which heals itself. When it wants to be cured, it is cured. And this is something very widely recognised now; even the most traditional doctors tell you, Yes, our medicines help, but it is not the medicines which cure, it is the body which decides to be cured. Very well, so when the body is told, Take this, it says to itself, Now I am going to get better, and because it says I am going to get better, well, it is cured!

1957-06-26 - Birth through direct transmutation - Man and woman - Judging others - divine Presence in all - New birth, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And so long as one is there, inside, one is in the falsehood. And only on the day when by the Divine Grace one can break the shell and come out into the Light, is one free.
This may happen suddenly, spontaneously, quite unexpectedly.

1958-02-19 - Experience of the supramental boat - The Censors - Absurdity of artificial means, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Every time I meet these gentlemen I welcome them, for they compel you to be absolutely sincere, they track down the most subtle hypocrisy and make you at every moment face your most secret vibrations. And they are intelligent!their intelligence infinitely surpasses ours: they know everything, they know how to turn against you the least thought, the least argument, the least action, with a truly wonderful subtlety. Nothing escapes them. But what gives a hostile tinge to these beings is the fact that they are first and foremost defeatists. They always paint the picture for you in the darkest colours; if need be they distort your own intentions. They are truly instruments of sincerity. But they always forget one thing, deliberately, something that they cast far behind as if it did not exist: the Divine Grace. They forget prayer, that spontaneous prayer which suddenly springs up from the depths of the being like an intense call, and brings down the Grace and changes the course of things.
And each time you have made some progress, have passed on to a higher level, they make you face once again all the acts of your past life, and in a few months, a few days or a few minutes, they make you go through all your exams once again at a higher level. And it is not enough to brush the thought aside and say, Oh! I know, and throw a little cloak over it so as not to see. You must face it and conquer, keep your consciousness full of light, without the least tremor, without a word, without the slightest vibration in the cells of the body and then the attack melts away.

1958-03-19 - General tension in humanity - Peace and progress - Perversion and vision of transformation, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There was a time, not so long ago, when the spiritual aspiration of man was turned towards a silent, inactive peace, detached from all worldly things, a flight from life, precisely to avoid battle, to rise above the struggle, escape all effort; it was a spiritual peace in which, along with the cessation of all tension, struggle, effort, there ceased also suffering in all its forms, and this was considered to be the true and only expression of a spiritual and divine life. It was considered to be the Divine Grace, the divine help, the divine intervention. And even now, in this age of anguish, tension, hypertension, this sovereign peace is the best received aid of all, the most welcome, the solace people ask and hope for. For many it is still the true sign of a divine intervention, of divine grace.
In fact, no matter what one wants to realise, one must begin by establishing this perfect and immutable peace; it is the basis from which one must work; but unless one is dreaming of an exclusive, personal and egoistic liberation, one cannot stop there. There is another aspect of the Divine Grace, the aspect of progress which will be victorious over all obstacles, the aspect which will propel humanity to a new realisation, which will open the doors of a new world and make it possible not only for a chosen few to benefit by the divine realisation but for their influence, their example, their power to bring to the rest of mankind new and better conditions.
This opens up roads of realisation into the future, possibilities which are already foreseen, when an entire part of humanity, the one which has opened consciously or unconsciously to the new forces, is lifted up, as it were, into a higher, more harmonious, more perfect life. Even if individual transformation is not always permissible or possible, there will be a kind of general uplifting, a harmonisation of the whole, which will make it possible for a new order, a new harmony to be established and for the anguish of the present disorder and struggle to disappear and be replaced by an order which will allow a harmonious functioning of the whole.

1958-04-02 - Correcting a mistake, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Correcting an ignorance is like eliminating darkness: you light a lamp, the darkness disappears. But to make a mistake once again when you know it is a mistake, is as if someone lighted a lamp and you deliberately put it out. That corresponds exactly to bringing the darkness back deliberately. For the argument of weakness does not hold. the Divine Grace is always there to help those who have decided to correct themselves, and they cannot say, I am too weak to correct myself. They can say that they still havent taken the resolution to correct themselves, that somewhere in the being there is something that has not decided to do it, and that is what is serious.
The argument of weakness is an excuse. The Grace is there to give the supreme strength to whoever takes the resolution.

1958-05-14 - Intellectual activity and subtle knowing - Understanding with the body, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In this new substance which is spreading and acting in the world, there is a warmth, a power, a joy so intense that all intellectual activity seems cold and dry beside it. And that is why the less one talks about these things the better it is. A single moment, a single impulse of deep and true love, an instant of the understanding which lies in the Divine Grace brings you much closer to the goal than all possible explanations.
Even a kind of refined sensation, subtle, clear, luminous, acute, which penetrates deep, opens the door for you more than the subtlest explanations.
And if we carry the experience still further, it seems that when one comes to the work of transformation of the body, when some cells of the body, more ready than others, more refined, more subtle, more plastic, are able to feel concretely the presence of the Divine Grace, the divine Will, the divine Power, this Knowledge that is not intellectual but a knowledge by identity, when one feels this in the cells of the body, then the experience is so total, so imperative, so living, concrete, tangible, real that everything else seems a vain dream.
And so we may say that it is truly when the circle is complete and the two extremities touch, when the highest manifests in the most material, that the experience will be truly conclusive.

1958-07-09 - Faith and personal effort, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Faith is certainly a gift given to us by the Divine Grace. It is like a door suddenly opening upon an eternal truth, through which we can see it, almost touch it.
As in everything else in the ascent of humanity, there is the necessityespecially at the beginningof personal effort. It is possible that in some exceptional circumstances, for reasons which completely elude our intelligence, faith may come almost accidentally, quite unexpectedly, almost without ever having been solicited, but most frequently it is an answer to a yearning, a need, an aspiration, something in the being that is seeking and longing, even though not in a very conscious and systematic way. But in any case, when faith has been granted, when one has had this sudden inner illumination, in order to preserve it constantly in the active consciousness individual effort is altogether indispensable. One must hold on to ones faith, will ones faith; one must seek it, cultivate it, protect it.

1958 10 03, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am not a Jnani The Jnani is one who follows the path of Knowledge, one who wants to realise Yoga exclusively through Knowledge, and who follows a purely intellectual path with the will to go beyond it and attain Knowledge, which is no longer intellectual, but spiritual. And Sri Aurobindo says: I am not a Jnani. I do not seek knowledge. I have given myself to the Divine to accomplish His work and, by the Divine Grace, at every moment I know what must be known in order to accomplish this work.
It is an admirable state; it is perfect peace of mind. There is no longer any need to accumulate acquired knowledge, received ideas which have to be memorised; it is no longer necessary to clutter ones brain with thousands and thousands of things in order to have at ones command, when the time comes, the knowledge that is needed to perform an action, to impart a teaching, to solve a problem. The mind is silent, the brain is still, everything is clear, quiet, calm; and at the right moment, by divine Grace a drop of light falls into the consciousness and what needs to be known is known. Why should one care to rememberwhy try to retain that knowledge? On the day or at the moment that it is needed one will have it again. At each second one is a blank page on which what must be known will be inscribedin the peace, the repose, the silence of a perfect receptivity.

1958-11-26 - The role of the Spirit - New birth, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
From a higher standpoint, this could be put in another way: it is this action, this luminous and liberating influence that is known as spirit. All that opens to us the road to the supreme realities, pulls us out from the mud of the Ignorance in which we are stuck, opens the doors to us, shows us the path, leads us to where we have to gothis is what man has called spirit. It is the atmosphere created by the Divine Grace in the universe to save it from the darkness into which it has fallen.
The soul is a kind of individual concentration of this Grace, its individual representative in the human being. The soul is something particular to humanity, it exists only in man. It is like a particular expression of the spirit in the human being. The beings of the other worlds do not have a soul, but they can live in the spirit. One might say that the soul is a delegation of the spirit in mankind, a special help to lead it faster. It is the soul that makes individual progress possible. The spirit, in its original form, has a more general, more collective action.

1960 03 30, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sir Philip Sidney was a statesman and a poet, but in spite of his success in life, he retained his humble nature. Seeing a criminal being taken to the gallows, he is supposed to have said the famous words which Sri Aurobindo quotes in his Aphorism and which could be paraphrased like this, That could have happened to me too, but for the Grace of God. Sri Aurobindo remarks that had Sir Philip Sidney been wiser he would have said, That could have happened to me too, by the Grace of God. For the Divine Grace is everywhere, always, behind everything and every event, whatever our reaction to that thing or event may be, whether it appears good or bad, catastrophic or beneficial.
And if Sir Philip had been a Yogi, he would have had the experience of human unity and he would have felt concretely that it was himself or a part of himself which was being led to the gallows and he would have known at the same time that everything that happens happens by the Grace of the Lord.

1960 04 07? - 28, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And yet in the last analysis everything really depends on the Divine Grace and we should look towards the future with confidence and serenity, at the same time progressing as fast as we can.
15 April 1960

1969 10 17, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is certain that for someone who has desires, when his desires are not satisfied, it is a sign that the Divine Grace is with him and wants, through experience, to make him progress rapidly, by teaching him that a willing and spontaneous surrender to the Divine Will is a much surer way to be happy in peace and light than the satisfaction of any desire.
17 October 1969

1969 12 29?, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What men usually call blind faith is in fact what the Divine Grace sometimes gives to those whose intelligence is not developed enough to have true knowledge. So blind faith can be something very respectable, although it is of course clear that one who has true knowledge is in a far superior position.
29 December 1969

1970 03 05, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In short, the Divine Grace is so marvellous that, whatever you do, it will lead you more or less quickly towards the Divine Goal.
5 March 1970

1970 03 11, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All the circumstances of life are arranged to teach us that, beyond mind, faith in the Divine Grace gives us the strength to go through all trials, to overcome all weaknesses and find the contact with the Divine Consciousness which gives us not only peace and joy but also physical balance and good health.
11 March 1970

2.05 - Apotheosis, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
ture of existence with the Divine Grace of his assisting presence,
so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast

2.05 - Blessings, #Words Of The Mother I, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Blessings are a manifestation of the Divine Grace, in favour of an individual or a collectivity.
22 October 1935

2.07 - The Mother Relations with Others, #Words Of The Mother I, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But for that you must have full faith in the Divine Grace and Love.
18 January 1962

2.1.3.1 - Students, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
However, there is a way to be free from it: it is to have faith in the Divine Grace and to rely on It to protect you in all circumstances.
The more you grow up, the more will you get over your fear if you let the contact with your soul develop in you that is to say, with the truth of your being and if you always strive that all you think, all you speak, all you do should be more and more the expression of this deep truth.

2.1.3.4 - Conduct, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
full of confidence in the Divine Grace,
full of deep respect for the Divine.

2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: Grace is grace; but one need not sit with folded hands. What is achieved is by the Divine Grace.
Sri Aurobindo: Grace is of course unconditional, but it is for men to fulfil the conditions. It is as if man was continually spilling from a cup in which something was being poured.

2.2.3 - Depression and Despondency, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I had already hinted to you that to be able to wait for the Divine Grace (not in a tamasic spirit, but with a sattwic reliance) was the best course for you. Prayer, yes but not prayer insisting on immediate fulfilment but prayer that is itself a communion of the mind and the heart with the Divine and can have the joy and satisfaction of itself, trusting for fulfilment by the Divine in His own time. Meditation? Yes, but your meditation has got into a wrong Asana, that of an eager and vehement wrestling followed by a bitter despair. It is no use getting on with it like that; it is better to drop it till you get a new Asana. (I am referring to the old Rishis who established an Asana, a place and a fixed position, where they would sit till they got siddhi but if the Asana got successfully disturbed by wrong forces (Asuras, Apsaras etc.), they left it and sought for a new one.) Moreover, your meditation is lacking in quietude, you meditate with a striving mind but it is in the quiet mind that the experience comes, as all Yogis agree the still water that reflects rightly the sun. Your vital besides is afraid of quietude and emptiness, and that is because, probably, the strife and effort in you make what comes of them something neutral or desert, while they should be a restful quietude and an emptiness giving the sense of peace, purity or release, the cup made empty so that the soma-rasa of the spirit may be poured in it. That is why I would like you to desist from these too strenuous efforts and go on quietly, praying and meditating if you like but tranquilly without strain and too vehement striving, letting the prayer and meditation (not too much of the latter) prepare the mind and heart till things begin to flow into them in a spontaneous current when all is ready.
***

2.3.02 - Opening, Sincerity and the Mother's Grace, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To practise Yoga implies the will to overcome all attachments and turn to the Divine alone. The principal thing in the Yoga is to trust in the Divine Grace at every step, to direct the thought continually to the Divine and to offer oneself till the being opens and the Mother's force can be felt working in the Adhara.
26 July 1932

2.3.08 - The Mother's Help in Difficulties, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
You must throw all that away. Such depression can only make you shut to what Mother is giving you. There is absolutely no good reason for such an attitude. The existence of difficulties is a known thing in the Yoga. That is no reason for questioning the final victory or the effectivity of the Divine Grace.
4 February 1933
--
- if you can't call her, think of her with the will to be rid of these things. Don't worry yourself with the idea whether you have true aspiration or not - the psychic being wants and that is sufficient. The rest is the Divine Grace, on which one must steadfastly rely - one's own merit, virtue or capacity is not the thing that brings the realisation.
I shall put the force to rid you of this obsession in any case, but if you can abandon these habitual ideas, it will make the disappearance of the attack easier.

2.3.1 - Ego and Its Forms, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Your nature like that of almost everybody has been largely ego-centric and the first stages of the sadhana are with almost everybody ego-centric. The main idea in it is always ones own sadhana, ones own endeavour, ones own development, perfection, siddhi. It is inevitable for most, for without that personal endeavour there would not be sufficient will or push to bring about the first necessary changes. But none of these thingsdevelopment, perfection or siddhican really come in any degree of completeness or unmixed finality until this ego-centric attitude changes into the God-centric, until it becomes the development, perfection, siddhi of the Divine Consciousness, its will and its instrumentation in this body and that can only be when these things become secondary, and bhakti for the Divine, love for the Divine, oneness with the Divine in consciousness, will, heart and body, become the sole aim the rest is then only the fulfilment of the Divine Will by the Divine Power. This attitude is never difficult for the psychic, it is its natural position and feeling, and whenever your psychic was in front, you had it in your central consciousness. But there were the outer mind, vital and physical that brought in their mixture of desire and ego and there could be no effective liberation in life and action till these were liberated. The thinking mind and higher vital can accept without too much difficulty, but the difficulty is with the lower vital and physical and especially with the most external parts of them; for these are entirely creatures of habit, recurring movement, an obstinate repetition of the same movement always. This habit is so blind and obstinate and persistent as to seem almost invincible, especially when it is used at a juncture like this by the Forces of Ignorance as their last refuge or point of attack. But the apparent invincibility is not true. The most ego-centric can change and do change by the psychic principle becoming established in the external nature. That it can be done only by the Divine Grace and Power is true (that is true of all spiritual change)but with the full consent of the being. As it was done in the inner being, so it can be done in the outer; give the adhesion of your full will and faith and, whatever the difficulty, it will be done.
***

2.3.2 - Desire, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Demand and desire are only two different aspects of the same thingnor is it necessary that a feeling should be agitated or restless to be a desire; it can be, on the contrary, quietly fixed and persistent or persistently recurrent. Demand or desire comes from the mental or the vital and a psychic or spiritual need is a different thing. The psychic does not demand or desire; it aspires; it does not make conditions for its surrender or withdraw if its aspiration is not immediately satisfied for the psychic has complete trust in the Divine or in the guru and can wait for the right time or the hour of the Divine Grace. The psychic has an insistence of its own, but it puts its pressure not on the Divine, but on the nature, placing a finger of light on all the defects there that stand in the way of the realisation, sifting out all that is mixed, ignorant or imperfect in the experience or in the movements of the Yoga and never satisfied with itself or with the nature till it has got it perfectly open to the Divine, free from all forms of ego, surrendered, simple and right in the attitude and all the movements. This is what has to be established entirely in the mind and vital and in the physical consciousness before supramentalisation of the whole nature is possible. Otherwise what one gets is more or less brilliant, half luminous, half cloudy illuminations and experiences on the mental and vital and physical planes, half truth, half error or at the best true only for those planes and inspired either from some larger mind or larger vital or at the best from the mental reaches above the human that intervene between the intellect and the Overmind. These can be very stimulating and satisfying up to a certain point and are good for those who want some spiritual realisation on these planes; but the supramental realisation is something much more difficult and exacting in its conditions and the most difficult of all is to bring it down on to the physical level.
***

2.4.2 - Interactions with Others and the Practice of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is true that mixing with others too closely tends to lower the condition, if they are not themselves in the right attitude and live very much in the vital. In all contacts what you have to do is to remain within, keep a detached attitude and not allow yourself to be troubled by the difficulties that arise in work or the movements of people, but keep yourself the true movement. Do not be caught by the desire to help othersdo and speak yourself the right thing from the inner poise and leave the help to come to them from the Divine. Nobody can really helponly the Divine Grace.
***

29.03 - In Her Company, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In this age, the saints say, the Divine is near to us, quite near. When we were young we were told that we have entered into Kali age, the age of darkness, of darkness and smallness, that is to say, human beings are small, small and weak in the body and in the inner make-up. But the Divine took pity on us and to be with us became himself small and perhaps apparently weak also (Vamana) to be human with us. In other ages, even in the Satya Yuga, the age of Truth, God, the Divine was very far from earth, away and aloof from the material universe (which was Illusion, Maya). Therefore in those days to reach the Divine, to attain nearness to God, one had to rise and mount on and on almost endlessly, strenuously. It needed tremendous, arduous labour, it was the age of tapasya,one had to be a tapasvito find God and reach him. But now it is different. God has come down to us and lodged himself in the material body. He continues to be in the earth atmosphere, but not very far from the material. In our childhood we used to hear that in Kali the practice of religion or spirituality has been made easy by the Divine Grace in view of man's frailty. In Kali man is now incapable of austerity, so, at present simply to utter God's name is sufficient to bring salvation. So I was saying the Divine help is at our door: the Divine himself is there in person. Only you have to be sincere and earnest about it, you have to extend your arms, extend your consciousness. It is a turning of the consciousness that is needed, it is to ask for it with the sincerity of a child. That is what the Mother used to say always: Be a child, be a child, I am with you always.
It is interesting to compare the Buddhist teaching:

30.09 - Lines of Tantra (Charyapada), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Divine Grace is descending from on High in a continuous stream, thus is obliterated the sense of Being and Non-Being, all doubts and difficulties as to whether It exists or not. On the screen of the individual consciousness there arises a strange Form, like Uma-Haimavati of the Upanishad. Bhusuku, this is your true Natural Form. Once you know and recognise It, all the bonds of sense are broken, the heart fills of itself with a supreme delight. This is the real purification of sense, this enables you to establish with the objects of sense, with all objects, your true and pure relation, giving as result the emergence of supreme Bliss. This is the Moon in your inner skies, the Delight within the three worlds of mind, life and body which spreads its moonshine on all your consciousness. Lo, there is left no trace of darkness in the Yogic mind of Bhusuku.
Let us move a little farther, into the realm of a deeper principle, into the mysteries of a mote complicated symbolism. Here is a specimen of riddling verse:

3.01 - Sincerity, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is through ignorance and stupidity that the being is insincere. But with a persevering will and an absolute confidence in the Divine Grace, one can cure this insincerity.
*
--
This sincerity brings the sure help of the Divine Grace.
Blessings.

3.03 - Faith and the Divine Grace, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
object:3.03 - Faith and the Divine Grace
class:chapter
Faith and the Divine Grace
FAITH
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
Have faith in the Divine, and go deep inside yourself. My help is always with you.
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
the Divine Grace
--
It is the Divine Grace that must be prayed for if justice were to manifest, very few would be those who could stand in front of it.
Justice is the strict logical determinism of the movements of
--
the Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice. The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the
Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrix through identity of the Divine Grace, with a perfect knowledge through identity of the absolute mechanism of Universal
Justice.
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
It is only the Divines Grace that can give peace, happiness, power, light, knowledge, beatitude and love in their essence and their truth.
--
Who is worthy or unworthy in front of the Divine Grace?
All are children of the one and the same Mother
--
Let us give ourselves without reserve to the Divine, so best shall we receive the Divine Grace.
The Grace is equally for all. But each one receives it according to his sincerity. It does not depend on outward circumstances but on a sincere aspiration and openness.
--
Call of the Divine Grace: not noisy but persistent and very perceptible to those who know how to listen.
85
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
FAITH IN the Divine Grace AND HELP
Have a steady faith in the Divine Grace.
Continue to have full faith in the Divines Grace, Will and Action and all will be all right.
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
At each moment of our life, in all circumstances the Grace is there helping us to surmount all difficulties.
--
Through this apparent chaos a new and better order is being formed. But to see it one must have faith in the Divine Grace.
Cheer up.
--
It is when all seems lost that all can be saved. When you have lost confidence in your personal power, then you should have faith in the Divine Grace.
28 January 1970
--
Have faith and unshaken confidence. the Divine Grace will do the rest.
New Year Message of 1947, CWM, Vol. 15, pp. 168 69.
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
Let us offer our will to the Divine Grace; it is the Grace that accomplishes all.
The Grace, the Grace alone can act. That alone can open the way, that alone can do the miracle.
--
We must learn to rely only on the Divine Grace and to call for its help in all circumstances; then it will work out constant miracles.
However long the journey may be and however great the traveller, at the end is always found exclusive reliance on the Divine
--
TRUST IN the Divine Grace AND HELP
The Grace is infinite for him who sincerely trusts the Grace.
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
Like the child who does not reason and has no care, trust thyself to the Divine that His will may be done.
--
Keep a cool head, strong and very quiet nerves, and a complete trust in the Divine Grace.
Aspiration for trust in the Divine: an intense need for that immutable peace given by the certitude of the Divine Grace.
Nothing can be compared to the peace that comes from a total trust in the Grace.
--
It is only by remaining perfectly peaceful and calm with an unshakable confidence and faith in the Divine Grace that you will allow circumstances to be as good as they can be. The very best happens always to those who have put their entire trust in the Divine and in the Divine alone.
9 February 1930
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
When, in your life, you meet with a hardship, take it as a Grace from the Lord and, indeed, it will become so.
--
In any case and whatever happens, always consider events as a gift from the Divine Grace which is leading you by swift paths towards the spiritual goal of your life.
14 January 1963
--
In any case, the only thing which is really effective is to will what the Divine wills, and to keep an unshakable confidence in the supreme compassion of the Divine Grace, for through that it is always the best that happens; not the best according to human ideas but the best according to the supreme Truth.
Be calm and full of a solid and pure faith.
--
All depends on what you want. If you want Yoga, take all that happens as the expression of the Divine Grace leading you towards your goal, and try to understand the lesson that circumstances give.
23 April 1964
--
When difficulties besiege you, know that the Divine Grace is with you.
People believe that the Grace means making everything smooth for all your life. It is not true.
--
Faith and the Divine Grace
The Grace is something that pushes you towards the goal to be attained. Do not try to judge it by your mind, you will not get anywhere, because it is something formidable which is not explained through human words or feelings. When the Grace acts, the result may or may not be pleasant it takes no account of any human value, it may even be a catastrophe from the ordinary and superficial point of view. But it is always the best for the individual. It is a blow that the Divine sends so that progress may be made by leaps and bounds. The Grace is that which makes you march swiftly towards the realisation.

3.1.3 - Difficulties of the Physical Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I have not the slightest doubt that you can do the sadhana if you cleave to itnot certainly on your own unaided strength, for nobody can do that, but by the will of the psychic being in you aided by the Divine Grace. There is a part in the physical and vital consciousness of every human being that has not the will for it, does not feel the capacity for it, distrusts any hope or promise of a spiritual future and is inert and indifferent to any such thing. At one period in the course of the sadhana this rises up and one feels identified with it. That has happened in you now, but along with an attack of ill health and nervous indisposition which has turned this passage through the obscure physical into a dark and intense trouble. With enough sleep and a quieting of the nerves and return of physical energy that ought to disappear and it would be possible to bring the Light and Consciousness down into this obscure part. An intense concentration bringing struggle is not what is needed, but a very quiet attitude of self-opening. Not any effort of sadhana just now, but the recovery of tranquillity and ease is what is wanted at present to restore the opening of the nature.
***

3.2.08 - Bhakti Yoga and Vaishnavism, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In any case one thing can never help and that is to despond always and say, I am unfit; I am not meant for the Yoga. And worse still are these perilous mental formations such as you are always accepting that you must fare like X (one whose difficulty of exaggerated ambition was quite different from yours) and that you have only six years etc. These are clear formations of the Dark Forces seeking not only to sterilise your aspiration but to lead you away and so prevent your sharing in the fruit of the victory hereafter. I do not know what Krishnaprem has said but his injunction, if you have rightly understood it, is one that cannot stand as valid, since so many have done Yoga relying on tapasya or anything else but not confident of any divine Grace. It is not that, but the souls demand for a higher Truth or a higher life that is indispensable. Where that is, the Divine Grace whether believed in or not, will intervene. If you believe, that hastens and facilitates things; if you cannot yet believe, still the souls aspiration will justify itself with whatever difficulty and struggle.
***
--
If it is Bhakti that one insists on, it is by Bhakti that Bhakti comes and Bhakti in its fullness is nothing but an entire self-giving, as Krishnaprem very rightly indicates. Then all meditation, all tapasya, all means of prayer or mantra must have that as its end and it is when one has progressed sufficiently in that that the Divine Grace descends and the realisation comes and develops till it is complete. But the moment of its advent is chosen by the wisdom of the Divine alone and one must have the strength to go on till it arrives; for when all is truly ready it cannot fail to come.
***

3.2.4 - Sex, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Again, you are entirely right in your resolution not to marry again; to do so would be in any case to invite serious and probably insuperable difficulties in your following the path of Yoga, and, as in this path of Yoga it is necessary to put away sexual desire, marriage would be not only meaningless but an absolute contradiction of your spiritual life. You can expect full support and protection from us in your resolve and, if you keep a sincere will and resolution in this matter, you may be sure that the Divine Grace will not fail you.
***

4.03 - Mistakes, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And once the progress has been made, the consequences of past errors, if there are any, disappear through the intervention of the Divine Grace.
For the Supreme Lord, sin does not exist all defect can be effaced by sincere aspiration and by transformation.

4.04 - Weaknesses, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All fear must be overcome and replaced by a total confidence in the Divine Grace.
6 June 1955

4.1.1 - The Difficulties of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The only thing to do with such depressing thoughts is not to indulge them, to send them away at once. Vital difficulties are the common lot of every human being and of every sadhak they are to be met with a quiet determination and confidence in the Divine Grace.
***

4.1.2 - The Difficulties of Human Nature, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yes, the solution is certainly the Divine Graceit comes of itself, intervening suddenly or with an increasing force when all is ready. Meanwhile it is there behind all the struggles, and the unconquerable aspiration for the light of which you speak is the outward sign that it will intervene. As for the two natures, it is only one form of the perpetual duality in human nature from which nobody escapes, so universal that many systems recognise it as a standing feature to be taken account of in their discipline, the two Personae, one bright, one dark, in every human being. If that were not there, Yoga would be an easy walk-over and there would be no struggle. But its presence is not any reason for thinking that there is unfitness; the obstinacy of the worldly element is also not a reason, for it is always obstinatein its very nature. It is like the Germans in their trenches, falling back and digging themselves in for a new mass attack, every time they are baffled. But for all that, if the bright persona is equally determined not to be satisfied without the crown of light, if it is strong enough to make the being unable to rest content in lesser things, then that is the sign that the being is called, one of the elect in spite of outward appearances and its own doubts and despairswho has them not, not even a Christ or a Buddha is without them and that the inner spirit will surely win in the end. There is no cause for any apprehension on that score.
***

4.2.1 - The Right Attitude towards Difficulties, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In any case one thing can never help and that is to despond always and say, I am unfit; I am not meant for the Yoga. And worse still are these perilous mental formations such as you are always accepting that you must fare like X (one whose difficulty of exaggerated ambition was quite different from yours) and that you have only six years etc. These are clear formations of the Dark Forces seeking not only to sterilise your aspiration but to lead you away and so prevent your sharing in the fruit of the victory hereafter. I do not know what Krishnaprem has said but his injunction, if you have rightly understood it, is one that cannot stand as valid, since so many have done Yoga relying on tapasya or anything else but not confident of any Divine Grace. It is not that, but the souls demand for a higher Truth or a higher life that is indispensable. Where that is, the Divine Grace whether believed in or not, will intervene. If you believe, that hastens and facilitates things; if you cannot yet believe, still the souls aspiration will justify itself with whatever difficulty and struggle.
***

4.2.5 - Dealing with Depression and Despondency, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Despair is absurd and talking of suicide quite out of place. However a man may stumble, the Divine Grace will be there so long as he aspires for it and in the end lead him through.
***

4.3.1 - The Hostile Forces and the Difficulties of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The hostile forces have a certain self-chosen function: it is to test the condition of the individual, of the work, of the earth itself and their readiness for the spiritual descent and fulfilment. At every step of the journey, they are there attacking furiously, criticising, suggesting, imposing despondency or inciting to revolt, raising unbelief, amassing difficulties. No doubt, they put a very exaggerated interpretation on the rights given them by their function, making mountains even out of what seems to us a mole-hill. A little trifling false step or mistake and they appear on the road and clap a whole Himalaya as a barrier across it. But this opposition has been permitted from of old not merely as a test or ordeal, but as a compulsion on us to seek a greater strength, a more perfect self-knowledge, an intenser purity and force of aspiration, a faith that nothing can crush, a more powerful descent of the Divine Grace.
***

4.3.3 - Dealing with Hostile Attacks, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By tamasic ego is meant the ego of weakness, self-depreciation, despondency, unbelief. The rajasic ego is puffed up with pride and self-esteem or stubbornly asserts itself at every step or else wherever it can; the tamasic ego on the contrary is always feeling, I am weak, I am miserable, I have no capacity, I am not loved or chosen by the Divine, I am so bad and incapablewhat can the Divine do for me? or else, I am specially chosen out for misfortune and suffering, all are preferred to me, all are progressing, I only am left behind, all abandons me, I have nothing before me but flight, death or disaster etc., etc., or something or all of these things mixed together. Sometimes the rajasic and tamasic ahankar mix together and subtly support each other. In both cases it is the I that is making a row about itself and clouding the true vision. The true spiritual or psychic vision is this, Whatever I may be, my soul is a child of the Divine and must reach the Divine sooner or later. I am imperfect but seek after the perfection of the Divine in me and that not I but the Divine Grace will bring about; if I keep to that, the Divine Grace itself will do all. The I has to take its proper place here as a small portion and instrument of the Divine, something that is nothing without the Divine but with the Grace can be everything that the Divine wishes it to be.
The Mothers help is always there but you are not conscious of it except when the psychic is active and the consciousness not clouded. The coming of suggestions is not a proof that the help is not there. Suggestions come to all, even to the greatest sadhaks or to the Avatarsas they came to Christ or Buddha. Obstacles are therethey are part of Nature and they have to be overcome. What has to be attained is not to accept the suggestions, not to admit them as the truth or as ones own thoughts, to see them for what they are and keep oneself separate. Obstacles have to be looked at as something wrong in the machinery of human nature which has to be changed they should not be regarded as sins or wrongdoings which make one despair of oneself and of the sadhana.

4.3.4 - Accidents, Possession, Madness, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is quite impossible for the descent of the Divine Grace to produce nausea and nervousness and a general disturbance like thatto think so is self-contradictory and foolish. Sometimes when one has pulled or strained, there is a headache or sensation as if of headache or if one pulls down too much force, then there may be a giddiness but one has only to remain quiet and that sets itself right by an assimilation of what has come down or otherwise. There is never any adverse or troublesome afterconsequence. What seems to have happened is that Xs finding the Force he had called down much more than what he was accustomed to, got nervous and went from nervousness into a panicwith the result of an upsetting of his stomach and circulation. If it is not that, then it must have been an attack of illness which he associated with the descent, but the attack seems to be of a nervous character. Probably if he had had the experience of this increased descent some time ago, he would not have been frightened and nothing would have happened, but the madness of Y following on the death of Z has created a panic and at the least thing each person thinks he is going to go mad or die. As nothing upsets the organism more than fear, they create by this general atmosphere of panic danger where there was none.
The idea that Y was sent mad by a descent of Divine Force is an absurdity and an irrational superstition. People go mad because they have a physical predisposition due either to heredity (as in the case of Y and A) or to some kind of organic cause or secret illness, like syphilis gone to the head or colon bacillus similarly misdirected or brain lesion or other material cause, the action being often brought up by some psychological factor (ambition turning to megalomania, hypochondria, melancholia etc.) or on the contrary itself bringing these to the surface. All that happens in ordinary life and not only in Yoga; the same causes work here. The one thing is that there may be an invasion of an alien Force bringing about the upsetting, but it is not the Divine Force, it is a vital Force that invades. The Divine Force cannot by its descent be the cause of madness any more than it can be of apoplexy or any other physical illness. If there is no predisposition one may have all kinds of attacks from vital or other forces or from ones own movements of the lower nature, as violent as possible, but there will be no madness.

7.02 - The Mind, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Above all the complication of so-called human wisdom there is the luminous simplicity of the Divine Grace ready to act if we allow it to act.
Life could be quite simple and easy if mans mind did not introduce in it so many useless complications.

7.03 - The Heart, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But for that you must have full faith in the Divine Grace and
Love.

7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
You may say again that it is the Divine Grace that
saves. But would you explain to me how it works?

BOOK XIII. - That death is penal, and had its origin in Adam's sin, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
There remains a question which must be discussed, and, by the help of the Lord God of truth, solved: If the motion of concupiscence in the unruly members of our first parents arose out of their sin, and only when the Divine Grace deserted them; and if it was on that occasion that their eyes were opened to see, or, more exactly, notice their nakedness, and that they covered their shame because the shameless motion of their members was not subject to their will,how, then, would they have begotten children had they remained sinless as they were created? But as this book must be concluded, and so large a question cannot be summarily disposed of, we may relegate it to the following book, in which it will be more conveniently treated.
MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH,

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
NIRODBARAN: You have said in your Prayers and Meditations that justice exists and one can't avoid the law of Karma except by the Divine Grace. Why
doesn't one believe in this Grace?
--
must have complete reliance on the Divine Grace and the Grace will do everything.
PURANI: Even that reliance requires effort.
--
is then meant by complete reliance on the Divine Grace?
SRI AUROBINDO: It means what it says. (Laughter)
--
a chauffeur. I was tempted to write to her that the Divine Grace (here the
Mother spoke in French; the sense seemed to be that the Divine Grace had
saved her.)

the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
27) If thy first endeavour to find the Eternal bears no fruit, lose not courage. Persevere and at last thou shalt obtain the Divine Grace. ~ Ramakrishna
28) Be persevering as one who shall last for ever. ~ Book of Golden Precepts

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