Sri Aurobindo Center of Los Angeles
Monthly Magazine
Theme : Offering to the Divine
  January 2019 Issue - XII
There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind’s immobility and thought-free stillness.

-Sri Aurobindo
Dedicated to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo who gave their lives to changing the earth-nature and earth-conditions so that the earth becomes a tenement of a Divine Life, and brought down the force of a supreme consciousness ushering a new age of Truth, Harmony, Peace and Love progressively.  The path to the Divine need not be anymore a "walk on the edge of a razor".
 
Center  Activities:

We made an auspicious start to the New Year 2019 by gathering together at the Center on Jan 1 in a collective aspiration to grow towards Her. Lakshman led us on a 20 minute brisk walk followed by a series of gentle exercises to keep the body fit, and shared with us the importance of the body in this Yoga, particularly the emphasis the Mother attached to it — a truth often overlooked by seekers. Inspirational readings and songs carried our collective aspiration to the Divine. The most captivating part of the program was the delightful sharing of songs, dance and puzzles by the children. Thanks to Hansa and her team. All of us became children that day.  It was a reminder of what the Mother stated:

One must be a child all one’s life, as much as one can, as long as one can. Be happy, joyful, content to be a child and remain a child, plastic stuff for shaping.

For me personally, I admit I prefer for my work someone who knows very little, has not laboured too much, but who has a great aspiration, much goodwill and who feels in himself this flame, this need for progressing.


The theme of the newsletter for this month is "Offering to the Divine". We find ourselves in a time where our engagement with the world largely occupies our life because of its demands and hence we are very busy and have "No time to stand beneath the boughs" as Shakespeare wrote. How can we balance this with our inner quest?. The Mother gives us a secret on how our activities can not only be reconciled with our inner seeking but made a powerful means for inner growth. That secret is to remember to make an offering of our activities to the Divine. We share some powerful insights from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo on this.

 We close with our continued best wishes for 2019. May it bring a new Light and Harmony to all our readers.
   Happy reading.

To the Divine you are worth no more than what you have given Him.

  To give to the Divine what one has in excess is not an offering.
         One should give at least something out of what one needs.

 

- The Mother.

To quiet the mind and get the spiritual experience it is necessary first to purify and prepare the nature. This sometimes takes many years. Work done with the right attitude is the easiest means for that – i.e. work done without desire or ego, rejecting all movements of desire, demand or ego when they come, done as an offering to the Divine Mother.

- Sri Aurobindo. 

     
                                       This month's theme:
                                       Offering to the Divine


Question your attitude                                                                   - The Mother

How to offer                                                                                     - The Mother

Offering makes your action yogic                                                - Sri Aurobindo

Giving to the Divine                                                                       - The Mother

How to get the remembrance and consciousness                   - Sri Aurobindo

 

Question your attitude                                                - The Mother        Home


The least detail of life and action, each movement of thought, even of sensation, of feeling, which is normally of little importance, becomes different the moment you look at it asking yourself, “Did I think this as an offering to the Divine, did I feel this as an an offering to the Divine?... “ If you recall this every moment of your life, the attitude becomes quite different from what it was before. It becomes very wide; it is a chain of innumerable little things each having its own place, whilst formerly you used to let them go by without being aware of them. That widens the field of consciousness. If you take a half-hour of your life and think of it, putting to yourself this question: “Is it a consecration to the Divine?” you will see that the small things become a big thing and you will have the impression that life becomes rich and luminous.

I always tell people in other words: whatever work you do whether you go to an office, keep accounts, drive a car, anything whatever the work you do, and naturally whomever you do it for, it must be an offering to the Divine. While doing it, you should keep the remembrance of the Divine and do it as an expression of your consecration to the Divine.
 

How to offer                                                                - The Mother        Home
 

Sweet Mother,
You have often told us that our activities must be an offering to the Divine. What does it mean exactly, and how to do it? For instance, when one plays tennis or basketball, how does one do that as an offering? Mental formations are not enough, naturally!
 
It means that what you do should not be done with a personal, egoistic aim, for success, for glory, for gain, for material profit or out of vanity, but as a service and an offering, in order to become more conscious of the divine will and to give oneself more entirely to it, until one has made enough progress to know and feel that it is the Divine who acts in you, His force that animates you and His will that supports you – not only a mental knowledge, but the sincerity of a state of consciousness and the power of a living experience.
For that to be possible, all egoistic motives and all egoistic reactions must disappear.  

 

Offering makes your action yogic                          - Sri Aurobindo        Home


The only work that spiritually purifies is that which is done without personal motives, without desire for fame or public recognition or worldly greatness, without insistence on one's own mental motives or vital lusts and demands or physical preferences, without vanity or crude self-assertion or claim for position or prestige, done for the sake of the Divine alone and at the command of the Divine. All work done in an egoistic spirit, however good for people in the world of the Ignorance, is of no avail to the seeker of the yoga.
 

 
The spiritual effectivity of work of course depends on the inner attitude. What is important is the spirit of offering put into the work. If one can in addition remember the Mother in the work or through a certain concentration feel the Mother's presence or force sustaining or doing the work, that carries the spiritual effectivity still farther. But even if one cannot in moments of clouding, depression or struggle do these things, yet there can be behind a love or bhakti which was the original motive power of the work and that can remain behind the cloud and re-emerge like the sun after dark periods. All sadhana is like that and it is why one should not be discouraged by the dark moments, but realise that the original urge is there and that therefore the dark moments are only an episode in the journey which will lead to greater progress when they are once over.


 
It is the spirit and the consciousness from which it is done that makes an action yogic – it is not the action itself.
 

Giving to the Divine                                                    - The Mother     Home

Never say, “I have nothing to give to the Divine.” There is always something to give, for always you can give yourself in a better and more complete way.

To the Divine you are worth no more than what you have given Him.

To give to the Divine what one has in excess is not an offering.

One should give at least something out of what one needs.

If you remember what you have given to the Divine, He will have no need of remembering it Himself; and if you ever mention the gift or speak of it to anybody, it is not to the Divine that you have made the offering but to the demon of your vanity.

Energy is in perpetual movement. It enters and leaves your physical being (mental, vital and material) and it is during your stay in what you call “you” that you must make of it an offering to the Divine  and put it at His service.

Duty towards the Divine is far more sacred than any social or family duty; it is all the more sacred because within the human collectivity it is almost wholly ignored or misunderstood.
 
The world and those who live in it have always wanted to put human − social and family − duty before duty to the Divine, which they have stigmatised as egoism. How indeed could they judge otherwise, they who have no experience of the reality of the Divine? But for the divine regard their opinion has no value, their will has no force. These are movements of ignorance, nothing more. You should not attempt to convince; above all, you should not let yourself be touched or shaken. You must shut yourself carefully within your ivory tower of consecration and await from the Divine alone help, protection, guidance and approbation. To be condemned by the whole world is nothing to him who knows that he has the approval of the Divine and his support.

How to get the remembrance and consciousness   -  Sri Aurobindo       Home


The remembrance and consciousness in work have to come by degrees, you must not expect to have it all at once; nobody can get it all at once. It comes in two ways, – first, if one practises remembering the Mother and offering the work to her each time one does something (not all the time one is doing, but at the beginning or whenever one can remember,) then that slowly becomes easy and habitual to the nature. Secondly, by the meditation an inner consciousness begins to develop which, after a time, not at once or suddenly, becomes more and more automatically permanent. One feels this as a separate consciousness from that outer which works. At first this separate consciousness is not felt when one is working, but as soon as the work stops one feels it was there all the time watching from behind; afterwards it begins to be felt during the work itself, as if there were two parts of oneself – one watching and supporting from behind and remembering the Mother and offering to her and the other doing the work. When this happens, then to work with the true consciousness becomes more and more easy.

 
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